Saniah, a three year old from Serang, Banten, was featured on a morning television news program recently after suffering from malnutrition and hydrocephalus.

The May 26 news program reported the low-income family could not afford to send their child to hospital for treatment and had never received financial or medical aid from the government or charity organizations.

Saniah is not the only child to have suffered from malnutrition. Heartbreaking stories of undernourished children can be heard all over the country. Still, a shocking fact emerged from research conducted in 2008 by the World Food Program (WFP) -- that approximately 13 million Indonesian children suffer from malnutrition.

Recently, UNICEF's Innocenti Research Centre released a report called "Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries" in the Educational Leadership Journal in May 2007. It said health was one category used to measure a child's well-being. The other five categories are material well-being, safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviors and risks and a subjective sense of well-being.

The study is relevant to the premise that if we believe children are the future of a nation, investment in children should reach the highest level of well-being in all six categories. The level of well-being in those categories undeniably reflects and determines the quality of the nation's future generation. The question is, has it become our nation's top priority?

At the outset, we as a nation must stand on common ground -- that ample and sufficient attention must be paid to the issue of children's well-being in this country. If we do not have a strong belief and awareness that children are the most important investment, we will, and probably have, put the future generation of this nation on the line.

Of the six categories, material well-being, health and education are probably vital for our efforts to prepare the young generation for future leadership. Material well-being has a strong and direct impact on health and education. We can imagine what kind of leaders would be made out of children who are unhealthy and poorly educated because their family cannot afford to send them to school. Health also affects a child's capacity to learn and achieve at school.

The following facts should be an alarm for the government and the whole nation: Indonesia's Central Statistics Agency notes in its 2007 report that 37.17 million people live below the poverty line, making up 17 percent of the total population.

Poverty has prevented lots of children of poor families from gaining access to education. The number of people living under the poverty line has even been predicted to increase by 15 million since the government decided to raise the fuel price late last month. This has made it even harder for lower- and middle-income families to meet their daily needs, let alone send their children to school.

Despite the increasing number of children who have access to primary education, UNICEF Indonesia has also reported that about two million children cannot afford to go to school due to poverty -- 15 percent of whom are aged between seven and 15. A report from UNICEF Indonesia also states that around one million children drop out of school every year.

Another worrying portrait of children's well-being in Indonesia is the high infant mortality rate. The Indonesian Association of Pediatricians reports that 36 infants from every 1,000 births die, and 10 out of 20 children aged between one and four years old die of various diseases such as dengue fever, tuberculosis, diarrhea and malnutrition.

A nerve-racking fact regarding child well-being in this country is the large number of children who have become victims of violence and abuse. Seto Mulyadi, chairman of the National Committee for Child Protection, was quoted as saying in a recent discussion that from January to April 2007 alone, there had been a total of 417 cases of child violence and abuse, 226 (more than 50 percent) of which took place at school.

It is ironic that school, which is supposed to be a safe and secure place for children, has turned into a place of threats and menace. A recent report also mentions that there has been an increase in school violence from 11 percent in 2006 to 39 percent in 2007, the largest part of which was committed by teachers (Kompas, June 6, 2008).

Despite the government's efforts to improve the quality of education by enforcing the nine-year compulsory education policy and applying a more constructive and holistic curriculum (which has been revised several times), it seems that achieving the ideal educational outcome remains wishful thinking.

Instead of increasing its budget for education, the government has reduced it by up to 15 percent, despite the fact that 19 percent of school buildings in Indonesia are badly damaged and in need of renovation. This reduction will result in a budget which is even lower than last year's.

Educational practices in Indonesia have been faced with great challenges. Although the vision statement articulated in the strategic plans of the Department of National Education maintains that education should be able to equip students with spiritual, emotional and cognitive intelligence; education, in practice, has been reduced to test-oriented school tasks.

This practice, of course, denies the vision statement itself because classroom activities are focused only on the cognitive domain. Future leaders should have not only intellectual capacity but also spiritual and emotional maturity and intelligence.

In addition, we can see that today's students have no more time to play and relax. Their days are overburdened with school assignments and homework. The eleventh grade students, for example, have to study 16 different subjects a week. After school, they still have to attend extra-curricular activities and arrive home tired. And homework is waiting for them.

Although we all know and understand that children are our future, it is obvious that investing in children has not become this nation's top priority. Now is the time for the whole nation to pay greater attention to the issue of children's well-being. Society should be invited to become actively engaged in health programs for children and campaigns to stop violence and abuse against children.

The government should build strong foundations for education by consistently seeking to work towards the goals articulated in the Strategic Plans of the Department of National Education.

The author, a teacher at SMA Kolese De Britto, Yogyakarta, is currently attending a graduate program at Loyola University Chicago, in the United States. He can be reached at widinugrohous@yahoo.com

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