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ast week was another exceptional seven days in the history of the human race. On the political front, the winds of change continued to spread across the Middle East and North Africa. To iron-fists everywhere, Tunisia and Egypt have become nightmares of unimaginable proportion. Far away, and a far-fetched connection perhaps, thousands of public service workers in Wisconsin and Ohio took to the streets to protest cutbacks in costs and collective bargaining rights.

In the world of medicine, the discovery of a unique gene in a tribe of Ecuadorian dwarfs has brought new hope for a miracle cure in the fight against cancer. In Chicago, a retired army sergeant received a mind-moved bionic arm, with science making dreams come true yet again. An exceptional week indeed. There may well have been other such developments around the world that remain unreported works-in-progress. But there are no boundaries to human achievement, we seem limited now only by our imagination.

Political or scientific, social or commercial, education is the primary catalyst for change. The lack of it keeps an Afghanistan in darkness, a Sweden well ahead and a Brazil surging forward. Asia, now the world’s engine for growth, has unlimited potential for economic prosperity primarily because a better educated workforce is attracting investment, and in turn, enlarging marketplaces both locally and internationally. Jobs are Job No.1, everywhere. For Presidents Obama, Hu and Yudhoyono, there is no greater priority. Presidents Soeharto and Mubarak learnt their lessons the hard way. Jobs, better jobs and better wages lie at the core of human dignity, of national progress. And education is the hand-maiden. A simple fact that still isn’t getting the attention it deserves in Indonesia. Ten years after its own revolution, the march towards a more enlightened society has been painfully slow, in contrast with it some of its neighbours. Many will argue that the need to open the windows of our minds has seen many close instead. The evidence will show that while progress is being made, it isn’t worthy of celebration.

In terms of “last level of education achieved”, here is the national scorecard over the last five years embracing all Indonesians 14 years of age and over. This is not census data, the information is from Roy Morgan Single Source and should therefore be treated as the most recent of all estimates.

At the top, 29 percent of the potential workforce has finished SMA or SMU, senior high school in other words. The number climbed steadily upwards from 25 to 29 during the years 2007 through 2009, then plateaued. Where it continues to climb are in the Top 20 cities of Indonesia, moving up from 39 in 2007 to 45 percent today and trending in the right direction. One in four have finished SMP, or middle school, a number that has flatlined over the last five years. The big cities continue to progress, moving up from 16 in 2007 to 19 percent at the end of 2010. One in four have finished SD, or primary school, nationwide. This number too is looking flat over recent years. In the Top 20 cities, it is heading down while those finishing middle and high school continue to grow. From a national perspective, the old claim of “80 percent literacy” hasn’t really moved much in five years. Not even 1 percent of Indonesians speaks english, in our increasingly borderless world.

Beyond school is where Indonesia’s true potential remains stagnant. Those who have finished D3 or attended a vocational school remain at around 2 percent of the population 14 years and older. Not everyone needs to go to university but a nation without enough trained electricians, plumbers, welders and other such skilled workers will remain handicapped. While their ranks are growing, they remain abysmally low as a percentage of the workforce. Unfortunately for Indonesia, the same is true in the realms of higher education. Those who have a university degree still remain a collectively around 1 percent, another flat line over the last five years. The mushrooming of privately owned universities in many big cities would appear to contradict that reality, till you stop to remember that the number of students in each are in the thousands, not in millions. This is a very large country.

The yawning gap between intent and reality is perhaps at its most visible in the fight against ignorance. Any proclamation that requires 25 percent of the state budget to be spent on education is worthy of collective applause. But if the reality is quite different, what should the people in power expect? It is widely rumoured there are some 25,000 of Saudi-funded madrassas spread across the archipelago, preaching among other things a Wahabbi brand of intolerance, washed down with free glasses of milk. The international coalition against terrorism has been painfully slow to realise that the lines of defence are being infiltrated via the minds of innocent youth, many the offspring of poorly educated parents. Four-thousand new schools with Australian funding are laudable indeed, but where are the Americans, the Europeans? Still peddling arms, used too often against the oppressed?

Let’s keep this real, and local. You want to help grow the consumer economy? Invest, or encourage investment in education, both higher and vocational. Because better education leads to better jobs, better wages, higher disposable incomes. Expecting the government to magically create tens of universities overnight is unrealistic, despite the pronouncements. What is achievable is public-private partnerships that can pull off a revolution in the education sector. At the heart lie tax breaks, for investors, educators as well as students who finish their degrees. That is something legislators should not find too difficult to comprehend. Same-old thinking at same-old speeds isn’t going to lift Indonesia up to where it belongs. Where it really belongs is up there, with the likes of neighbors like South Korea.

These observations are based on Roy Morgan Single Source. In Indonesia, it is the country’s largest syndicated survey with over 25,000 respondents annually, projected to reflect 90 percent of the population over the age of 14. It reflects life not only in the cities, but the towns and villages as well.