Once initiated by the private schools, state schools are now more ambitious to establish international-standard schools, enticing particularly well-off students to enroll in the schools.
This phenomenon has been described by education observers here as an attempt to create a caste system among students hailing from various socioeconomic backgrounds. The creation of a caste system, as reported by the Kompas daily (June 3), is not a delusion, but a real phenomenon.
While it absolutely makes sense to argue that tight global competition compels us to boost the quality of our education (through, among other things, the use of English as the language of instruction, as well as the updating of the curriculum and teaching materials), it is indeed a pedagogical fallacy to assume that learners, due to their low socioeconomic backgrounds, are so cognitively handicapped that they do not deserve access to quality education.
The public’s suspicion that current educational practices tend to be more about profit making than quality-oriented is assuredly well-founded.
First, the establishment of international-standard schools does not necessarily grant quality enhancement.
It is quite difficult to fathom the logic of the correlation between quality enhancement and the internationalization of the standards as there is neither a direct nor indirect cause-and-effect relationship here.
Second, it remains unclear as to what philosophical outlook or academic rationalism will be adopted for the establishment of such schools. A philosophical orientation is ineluctably vital because it affects the goals, content, method, and teaching materials.
The problem of philosophical formulation here lies in the fuzzy notion of international. There is no consensus among the policy makers as to what constitutes international. So far, such a notion is understood narrowly in terms of the use of the English language as a medium of instruction, nothing else.
The government’ issuance of a policy espousing the establishment of such internationally labeled schools can give rise to a harmful dichotomy of international versus national (i.e. regular) schools.
As such, the policy has the potential to perpetuate the perception that schools bearing the label international are more superior in terms of quality than the regular ones, which in the end encourages parents to harbor a deep distrust of the quality of national education.
A hasty, haphazard decision of espousing the establishment of internationally labeled schools by no means helps boost the quality of our education, but rather exacerbates the national education system.
If the tenuous notion of international is construed in terms of the use of English as a medium
of instruction, the challenge is quite notorious — the paucity of teachers having professional skills in the language.
However, if it is taken to mean the importation of the content of the curriculum to be used in the local context, as has been widely practiced by purportedly private international-standard schools here, then we are downplaying the importance of inculcating local wisdoms into our students. We are, in essence, distrusting the quality of the national education system.
Granted that this assumption is true, we will become entangled in the long-practiced knowledge consumption rather than knowledge construction, let alone knowledge production.
Obviously, internationalizing our education standard to be from the Western vantage point (e.g. importing the curriculum) is an instance of knowledge consumption practice.
This is, however, not to say that we always resist everything imported. What we need to do now is to open our mind so that we, in our attempt to boost the quality of national education, can negotiate the status of knowledge we are adopting by reappraising it.
By so doing, not only can we find a solution that is more culturally congenial and ecologically sensitive to our educational quandary, but we can also internationalize our education standard purely from the perspective of our local contexts.
The writer is an associate professor at Atma Jaya Catholic University, Jakarta. He is chief editor of Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching.
