As predicted, the national curriculum will once again undergo a change. Now under new minister, M. Nuh, the Educational Ministry is baffling the public by unveiling the so-called entrepreneurship-based curriculum.
It will be implemented in elementary through to higher education nationwide from the academic year 2010 to 2011.
Although not having failed, the current Education Unit Level Curriculum (KTSP), a legacy of Nuh's predecessor - Bambang Sudibyo - is likely to be replaced by the entrepreneurship-based curriculum.
As the name implies, the new curriculum is oriented to the spirit of entrepreneurship. It is believed that armed with an entrepreneurial skill, school graduates are better positioned to respond to the demands of globalization.
It is interesting to observe that throughout the history of Indonesian education, changing from one curriculum to another has been done without a clear raison d'etre. This implies that we have no solid philosophical outlook for our educational system.
Rather than treating education as a professional field of inquiry, we are fond of experimenting with it without a clear philosophical base. The shift of the KTSP to the entrepreneurship-based curriculum, for instance, seems to be a haphazard, arbitrary, one-sided and myopic move, ignoring the nature of education as a multidisciplinary source of discipline.
By shifting to a new orientation, an effective panacea for the "drawbacks" of the previous curriculum can also be found.
The entrepreneurship-based curriculum, so the argument goes, fits current societal demands, such as an entrepreneurial spirit should be cultivated at an early age. Though such an assumption may be valid for a certain group of society, it may not be viable for other groups.
Educational assumptions, often manifested via curricular guidelines, can only be verified by embracing multidisciplinary insights from distinct, yet related inquiries such as psychology, history, sociology, and philosophy.
Regrettably, much of what has been exercised to amend the curriculum in the country thus far has focused only on the goal, content or substance of the curriculum. In other words, curriculum change has attempted to answer the questions: What needs to be learned and what does the curriculum attempt to accomplish? Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the curriculum shift is concerned primarily with the definition of goals and the clarification and conceptualization of content.
What has been ignored are the underlying ideological and philosophical motives that often impel such a change. But these assumptions are paramount, for they greatly affect the choice of goals and substance of the curriculum.
Given diverse ideological, cultural, political and social circumstances that relate to the implementation of a curriculum, the effective execution of the entrepreneurship curriculum is indubitably called into question.
The following questions are worth musing before deciding to execute the curriculum: Has the entrepreneurship curriculum selected goals and content that reflect the above circumstances? Will the exclusive attention to entrepreneur skill detract from the students' academic skill? How can curriculum quality control be carried out systematically? And most importantly, have the results of the curriculum-to-be, been seriously considered?
Related to the last question, more questions arise: What do its teaching materials look like? How can they be designed to match the requirements of the curriculum? What instruments can be used to effectively and efficiently assess students' learning performance at local, regional and national levels?
With these complexities, the execution of an entrepreneur-based curriculum is likely to face tough challenges. Clearly, situating it in a broader context by incorporating insights from multidisciplinary studies is revealing to acquire general perspectives about education and problem identification.
The writer is associate professor at Atma Jaya Catholic University, Jakarta. He is chief editor of the Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching.
