JP/Anetotia Ponting
Wanti Wowor is not your typical headmaster. The woman and founder of Morning Star Academy appears anything but scary. Her voice will not make your heart start pounding if she singles you out by calling your name.
She actually looks more like a well-dressed businesswoman. She knows her students by name and greets former students with a kiss, just like your auntie does at your family reunions.
At this unusual school in Kuni ngan, South Jakarta, students only attend classes three or four days a week and parents are welcome inside the classrooms.
Most of the teachers, about 90 percent, are parents with professional backgrounds — doctors, entrepreneurs, bankers — whom Wanti has trained to become the educators of their own children. Wanti supplements their efforts with professional tutors trained in specialized areas such as Mandarin and history.
Wanti has developed a reputation as a pioneer in home schooling methods in the country. She created the school in part to alleviate her own disappointment with the Indonesian education system. She needed to create a place that embodies the changes she wanted to see take root more broadly.
More than 10 years ago, she was a frustrated mother, dissatisfied by how the schools were educating her children.
She surveyed a number of schools in Jakarta, both local and international, hoping to find a better alternative, but found the same things missing at every school.
One lack was the major benefit she believes every student should get from an education: wisdom, the ability to solve problems.
“I found the schools only gave the students an awful lot of tasks and made them memorize what was written in textbooks,” Wanti said.
In the middle of her frustrating quest, Wanti learned about the concept of home schooling, and started to consider whether that idea offered the solution she had been looking for.
For two years she researched home schooling, made several trips to the United States where she grew up, learned directly about home-schooling practices and brought back curriculum guidelines and books which were hard to get in Indonesia.
In 1992, feeling ready, she took her four children out of school and began guiding their education herself.
“I wanted to make sure my children get the right education. I wanted to teach my children to understand about life, to ask questions and be curious, not just accept ideas.
“It was hard for my family and friends to accept the concept of home education. They thought we were risking our children’s future.
Her oldest now works as a fashion designer, the second is a psychology graduate, the third is still a student and the youngest is a teacher’s apprentice.
Once Wanti saw her methods were working, she wanted to establish her system on a larger scale. She founded Morning Star Academy in 2002 based on her researched and tested home-schooling principles.
The school puts special emphasis on getting parents involved in their children’s
education.
“What usually happens is, once they pay tuition, parents expect the school to solve their children’s problems,” Wanti said. “The higher the tuition is, the higher the expectations.”
Parents could be as difficult to manage as kids, even more difficult at times.
“If anything goes wrong, parents can usually just point their fingers at the teachers.”
To counter this, Morning Star Academy forces the parents to take responsibility for monitoring the children. It’s nothing strange when Morning Star parents are asked to stay in school for an extra study period if they show up late.
Wanti’s concept, still so foreign to most Indonesian parents, did not meet with a surge of enthusiasm in the beginning. The school was launched with only 30 students in grades one through six.
“One of the basic requirements to enroll a child here is the parents must commit to the time necessary to help their children. It was a big challenge for parents to take on this responsibility.”
Despite the slow start-up, Wanti said, after the parents saw dramatic changes in their children’s lives and felt how the school was reinforcing the family, “news about the school spread quickly through word of mouth.” More than 600 students have graduated from the school so far.
Once Morning Star was on solid footing in 2005, Wanti started building schools in slums and remote areas in Indonesia. Teluk Gong, an impoverished area in North Jakarta where Wanti has built a school, also serves as the neighborhood site where Morning Star students in their final year do community service.
“I want to teach my students, who come from well-off families for the most part, that the unfortunate people in Teluk Gong are part of their community and therefore a part of our responsibility,” she said.
More than 20 schools have sprung up in villages which Wanti herself had never heard of before going there to meet her future students. For example, she is running schools in Sosok in West Kalimantan; in Alor in East Nusa Tenggara; and in Sukur in Sulawesi.
Parents in these remote schools, who often have had no access to a proper basic education themselves, get coaching on how to educate their children at home and how to help their children learn problem-solving.
“Now that technology is getting better, we are taking in all kinds of information. Not all the information is true, but if you don’t have analytical skills, you’ll believe what you hear and see on the media. And now media penetrates to even the remotest villages in Indonesia. The results are you lose time and money and you’re not developing.”
She said she sees building these schools as one way she can set an example.
“Many of us are always angry and just complain about what’s wrong with this nation.... We don’t have to be told what’s wrong, we already know. Instead we need to try to think what we can do to start making changes.”
In the generations to come, Wanti hopes what she teaches will become a legacy that lives on in her students even when classes are over. “And even once I’m not around any more.”
