Letters: Overburdened students

With more and more new schools, private schools are starting their enrollment earlier to vie for parents’ attention. The start of the school academic year is still five months away. However, students who will start elementary, secondary or high school need to sit for entrance tests as early as January.

Even the kindergarteners who are registering for elementary school are expected to sit for written entrance tests — a paper-based test for their mastery of the 3Rs (reading, writing, arithmetic) to determine whether they are ready for grade one… never mind that they have not even finished the whole kindergarten term yet.

In one of the national plus schools, a five-year-old girl worked on her paper-based test — a long list of addition and subtraction sums that the child had to complete as a measure of her readiness for elementary school. The little girl eventually finished the test but made too many mistakes. She was asked to try again after three months. At another school, the written test was a worksheet that required the child (with no help from the attending teacher) to read, understand the written instructions and fill in the answers in the appropriate spaces provided, with acceptable handwriting (right size, written within the spaces provided and, of course, correctly formed) quite a feat for five- and six-year-olds, who are still in the developmental stage of enhancing their fine motor skills and concentration.    

This situation persists from year to year and becomes ever more aggravating. Some schools require kindergarten children to have an IQ test before sitting for the entrance test. As someone who works in the field of early childhood education, I feel empathy for the anxious parents and teachers who worry that their children’s academic skills are not up to par with the inflated requirements of the entrance tests.

However, my deeper concern is for the young children who are pushed to master the required academic skills in the short period of one and a half years of kindergarten, for acceptance in the so-called favorite schools. These tests are driving the way children are being educated in schools and in the home. The methods employed in school and at home tend to focus on extended sessions of academic drilling, which is definitely not developmentally appropriate for young children.

Implementing methods of academic drilling may prepare the child to respond well to certain questions in academic tests, but do not meet the true goals of “learning” which, according to Prof. Lilian Katz (Professor Emerita of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois), include the following: to impart not only knowledge, but also to facilitate understanding and to develop not only skills but also the disposition or habit to learn.

Bringing my concern to the Directorate General of Early Childhood Education, at the National Education Ministry, I was informed that the directorate had implemented a nationwide early childhood teacher training program for the non-formal Early Childhood Centers (PAUD).

However, kindergartens (TK) fall under the jurisdiction of the formal education sector. I do not have enough data as to the programs that have been implemented in the formal education sector.
However, being involved on a day-to-day basis in the field of formal early childhood education, I can tell that the learning methods implemented are far from the developmental needs of our precious young children.


Shoba Dewey Chugani
Jakarta