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View all search resultsFont is never the point
What started as a presidential complaint about tiny font sizes has spiraled into an alarming, state-driven overhaul to rewrite Indonesian history.
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Natural sciences: Senior high school students read a biology book together at SMAN 1 Pekalongan, Central Java. (Unsplash/Courtesy of Ed Us). (Unsplash/Courtesy of Ed Us)
P
resident Prabowo Subianto dropped by a few schools, glanced at the textbooks, and concluded the font size was simply too small. From that passing observation, a sweeping national textbook overhaul was born.
On Aug. 7, Cabinet Secretary Teddy Indra Wijaya announced that the President had ordered a comprehensive review of all school textbooks, from elementary through senior high school, bench-marking them against materials from ASEAN neighbors like Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam and Cambodia. An interministerial team was promptly assembled to oversee the task.
Yet, as the President’s Office soon revealed, the overhaul extends beyond layout adjustments: it will also tackle content, focusing specifically on "nationalism and nationhood".
The font, of course, is not the point.
School textbooks certainly have room for improvement. The paper degrades quickly, ironic for a country home to major pulp and paper tycoons, and overall production quality consistently lags behind regional peers. These are tangible issues, and fixing them is uncontroversial.
Upgrading paper stock and typography, however, does not warrant rewriting curriculum content. And content revisions prompted on a presidential whim, dressed in vague platitudes about "nationalism and nationhood", do not constitute an educational policy. It is an invitation to something far more sinister.
The timing makes the intent hard to ignore. This textbook initiative arrives just as the government prepares to publish an 8,000-page, 10-volume national history collection commissioned by the Culture Ministry and drafted by over 100 historians.
