With the presidential election process almost complete and the next president almost certain, a number of issues are still lingering. Some, however, were not sufficiently debated during the election process. One of the issues is education.
Now that we are almost certain who is going to occupy the presidential seat, it is time for us to find out how the incumbent will continue to rule the country. One should be curious to know if the education policy and vision will be part an important part of his continued plans.
In the past presidential term, and in the previous governments, education has always been considered a secondary area for Indonesia. The perception was that we were a nation that could not afford to have a quality education system before the national economy was strong enough to support it.
The citizens were told that the economy needed to be stronger to enable a better education system. The economy, but not education, has been the government's top priority. This has been the principle guiding governmental policy since the 1970s.
In his book, Education for 1.3 Billion, Li Lanqing explains a totally different principle. He was the vice premier of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from 1993 to 2003, and was deeply concerned with education, especially basic education. Moreover, he has developed a strong sense of leadership in the field of education. His principle is the opposite of our traditional national development policy.
In his book, he uses his experience as an economist to reason the primary principle that basic education drives the economy of a country. Thus, basic education is the locomotive of a nation's development.
During the last 15 years, his policy has shown good results. The PRC is now one of the strongest economies in the world. About 20 years ago, the Chinese government realized that they had huge population and that they needed to develop their culture, science, and technology fields to become a stronger country. The huge population in particular was a burden to the nation's development.
We are suffering from similar conditions in our country now. Twenty years ago, one would say our economy was in better shape than the PRC's. At the same time, the quality of our national education might have been more or less in the same league as the PRC's. The question now is what is the driving force for our country to make the changes that the PRC has already made?
In the case of the PRC, they have shown that education, in particular basic education, should be the primary target to strengthen before we can become a strong economic power.
Education should be the powerhouse of the economy, and not the other way round. Thus, our next government should be able to redirect the developmental vision of the nation by putting education first.
It is true that the improvement of education is not free. It requires great financial support. It is also true that our financial resources are limited, but we should put our present national resources toward strengthening our education system first. We should optimize the utilization of resources we already have to create a quality basic education system, similar to those in developed nations. It is almost impossible to maintain economic growth without quality education.
Our economy cannot be sustained, unless we have sufficient educated human resources. We are in a new era and we should realize that if we are implementing our old New Order era policies that emphasize the economy, we will create an artificial economic state of being. We should realize that we will be driving backward instead of forward as we neglect the education of the people who are the true foundation of a powerful economy.
Making education a priority will enable Indonesia to compete successfully in the in the modern world. In particular, according to the well-known joint study by Murnane and Levi, from MIT and Harvard University, modern people will need more and more complex reasoning abilities in the future.
At the same time, routine cognitive skills will be needed less. Machines or computers will do the jobs that rely merely on fixed procedures like "if-then" rules.
On the other hand, the skills that rely on non-routine cognitive skills like problem solving skills will be in greater need. Unfortunately, our present education practices seem to maintain systems of the past. The current education practices prepare our students for jobs, situated in our grandfathers' era, namely the industrial age. Our current practices and policies place too much emphasis on routine-cognitive skills.
For example, our national standardized tests do not sufficiently assess the high-order thinking capabilities of students. Instead, our tests focus on measuring lower-order thinking skills such as facts, formula memorization and procedural computation skills. Our national standardized math tests, for example, seem to concentrate too much on complicated calculations, but not sophisticated reasoning. Nowadays the tests should focus on assessing students' reasoning skills.
This unfortunate situation is worsened by the fact the national standardized tests are seen as an absolute measure. The present government stubbornly considers these imperfect national tests as absolute truth.
This makes our teachers unwilling to teach high-order thinking skills to the students. They question the importance of teaching the students high-order thinking skills when the most important assessment test in the country does not evaluate their high-order thinking skills.
More precisely, the national tests have become more of a detriment to the classroom and day-to-day assessments. Basic education is thus forced to prepare the students for the exams, and therefore does not nurture their characters. This is the second challenge for our next government. They should be able to shift and transform current education policies to vision driven ones.
Specifically, the national education minister should be carefully selected. The minister should not only have sufficient understanding of educational issues, but he or she should also have a commitment to our nation's long-term visions. The appointment should not be based solely on short-term political considerations.
At the university level, policies and practices should also be based on vision. Pragmatism, such as world ranking should not be the primary agenda of tertiary education institutions. Instead, post secondary education institutions should start working on sustainable development issues.
In particular, academic communities should start working on issues regarding traits that enable us as a nation to develop sustainability. This means that this nation could develop significantly with some guarantee that this development is sustainable. Research and education works should converge on managing both the environment and social conditions intelligently. The community services provided by the universities should directly contribute to the society.
In particular, at this moment, the need for quality teachers is crucial and urgent. Therefore, the next government should design some affirmative and strategic actions for promoting the teaching profession and teacher preparation education. This is another challenge for our next government.
The writer is associate professor at Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB).
