I won when we went to Italy in 1968. According to my results on the entrance exams to an American international school in Rome, I was enrolled in the ninth grade. This meant that I could skip two grades, as I was in the school level equivalent to the seventh grade when I left Jakarta.

Ironically, I lost when I returned to Indonesia three years later in 1971. Without putting me through any tests, the headmaster of the high school I enrolled in told me that I was only allowed to start in the first year of senior high school) — or equivalent to the 10th grade — if I wanted to enter the science stream. If I entered the humanities stream, then I could start in the second year of senior high, or 11th grade.

I told him that I had skipped two years in Rome, that I was in the top 10 of the honors class at that school and showed him my school records to prove it. His reply? “Oh, they are probably just better in languages there.” I was furious: “If the education system is superior in Indonesia, why is our country so backward then?”

In Italy, the criteria for my class placement were objective, based on IQ or whatever test it was that they gave me. In Indonesia, it was based on the discretion of a headmaster who had delusions of grandeur about our education system.

So where does Indonesia stand on the education index?

The Education Index of the United Nation’s 2018 Human Development Index ranks Indonesia 113rd out of 188 countries, while the Network for Education Watch Indonesia (JPPI) ranked us lower than the Philippines and even Ethiopia in in 2016.

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