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Editorial: Back to school
As the school holidays come to an end, life returns to normal — waking up earlier, busier mornings and navigating more congested roads, particularly those who live in urban areas like Jakarta
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s the school holidays come to an end, life returns to normal — waking up earlier, busier mornings and navigating more congested roads, particularly those who live in urban areas like Jakarta.
Students will be back to their schools or go to new schools on Monday with their new uniforms, new friends, new teachers, and hopefully with fresh brains to start their classes, following weeks of freedom from their daily school routine .
Meanwhile, parents send their children with relief, not because they were unhappy spending more time with them, but because they have managed to deal with extraordinary expenses, although many of them had to go to pawn shops or borrow money from cooperatives and banks just to cover ever increasing school costs.
It is undeniable that quality education is expensive, and it is not fair to expect the government to bear all the burdens. The Constitution has mandated the state to allocate 20 percent of the total annual budget for education, but even with that mandatory budgeting, again, education costs should be shared by all stakeholders, including parents.
But still, the government should remember that the cost to send their children to school or to get higher education has overburdened many parents, and not just those from low-income families.
School holidays are always followed by extra spending: enrollment fees for those whose children starting at new schools, registration fees for those whose children still are returning to the same schools, new text books, new uniforms, and other new school equipment.
Parents in Jakarta are luckier than those in other provinces because taxpayers’ money manages to cover nearly all school costs up to junior high school level, but many state schools in its neighboring cities — Bekasi, Depok, Bogor, and Tangerang — set up to Rp 4 million (US$420) of enrollment fees for new students.
The opening of the International Standard School Pilot Project (RSBI) by selected state schools even further reduces the opportunity of more parents to send their children to state schools because such schools are allowed to set even higher school fees. As an example, a state school in East Tangerang, Banten, has an entrance fee set at Rp 10.5 million, which excludes text books, uniforms and the student’s year of additional activity costs.
National Education Minister Muhammad Nuh said that last year, around 1.7 percent of primary school students in the country were unable to finish their education, while 10 percent of those who graduated did not continue on to junior high.
Meanwhile, according to the national labor survey (Sakernas), 4.3 million out of 35.7 million of children aged between 10 and 17 in Indonesia have entered the workforces, which surely limits their opportunity to attend their classes.
There is a law that makes compulsory nine years of education for Indonesian children. But unfortunately state schools still cannot give free education, or even affordable school costs to all children up to at least junior high school. The country’s education system is truly a bleak story.
