Three promising characteristics, focusing on essential materials, teacher autonomy and project-based learning, distinguish the new curriculum from the existing 2013 curriculum. The education minister said that the freedom curriculum aimed to respond to the prevailing education crisis, made worse during the remote learning policy as indicated by reported learning loss.

Will the freedom curriculum allow the education system to overcome the crisis and lift up human capital?

Referring to the 2018 results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), our 15-year-olds’ average performance in reading, mathematics and science respectively rank 71st, 70th and 69th out of 77 countries. The country note from PISA 2018 further reveals that around 40 percent of Indonesian students achieved level 2 or higher in science, compared to the 78 percent average among the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The definition for PISA's level 2 in science means students can explain basic scientific phenomena and evaluate the validity of a conclusion based on the data.

Nevertheless, 0.1 percent of Indonesian students were top performers in science, meaning they were at level 5 or 6, constituting the OECD average of 7 percent (OECD, 2019). These students can creatively and autonomously apply their scientific knowledge to various situations, including unfamiliar ones. This finding shows the prevalent issue of inequality in Indonesian education.

The prolonged pandemic has further served as a magnifying glass, exposing inequality in the provision of quality education for all students across the nation. Students from privileged backgrounds have enjoyed learning online and even accelerated their learning through high-quality resources from anywhere in the world, while those from disadvantaged backgrounds lacked access to the internet and the devices they need to access adequate resources.

As spelled out in the fourth Sustainable Development Goal, education is regarded as an important avenue to sustainable national development, reducing poverty and inequality. Ironically, however, education has often been held responsible for perpetuating inequality itself. Educational inequality not only betrays the spirit of the "education for all” agenda, but also undermines long-term economic growth and threatens the development of civil societies.

The term “Matthew effect”, taken from the biblical passage “For whoever has will be given more, and they will have abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken away” (Matthew 25:29), has been applied to many different areas of human endeavor.

In the education sector, where the Matthew effect has been observed in the widening achievement gap among students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, children from middle-class families come to school with a higher level of readiness because their parents have spent more time reading to them and providing more learning resources at home.

The late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu pointed to education as the means by which the dominant privileged social classes reproduce their culture, and sought deliberately to shed light on the usually invisible processes underlying such social inequalities. Bourdieu’s best-known concept, cultural capital, pointed out that schools and other key institutions in society had certain norms for how people should think, speak, dress and generally behave.

This applies in the Indonesian context, as well. Children who grow up in families that adhere to these norms gain cultural capital that increases their chances of success.

On the other hand, children who grow up with parents who, for example, did not have the chance to obtain quality formal education themselves and thus did not transmit the expected codes to their children may be perceived as deficient by their teachers.

The Kurikulum Merdeka and Merdeka Belajar platform convey high hopes for improving Indonesian education. The curriculum promises a pedagogical breakthrough for the nation and allows educators to leapfrog in preparing young people to contribute to the making of a more prosperous, just and dignified Indonesia.

In supporting the curriculum, the platform provides learning resources that educators can tap so they can design and deliver more quality learning processes. In conjunction with the preceding 14 episodes of the Freedom to Learn Agenda, the curriculum and platform are both necessary to drive reform in the national education system.

In the short term, the 0.1 percent of top-performing young Indonesians can be expanded to a bigger figure through effective implementation of Kurikulum Merdeka and its supporting platform. But what will happen to the 20 percent in the bottom rung of society?

The prevailing Matthew effect has become more apparent during the COVID-19 school closure policy. As a SMERU study found, 30 percent of elementary school teachers in Java and 50 percent of elementary school teachers outside Java did not hold any classes during the study at home period (Alifia et al., 2020).

This finding is in line with data from the World Bank (July 29, 2021), which revealed a disparity in internet access between urban and rural areas. Until 2019, only 36 percent of adults in rural areas had internet access compared to 62 percent in urban areas (Akada).

In the very long term, the Matthew effect will contribute to widening the divide among economic and cultural classes. Warning about the Matthew effect is not meant to stop the privileged few from excelling. In fact, they should be lauded for setting the bar high and showing what our learners are capable of.

The crucial undertaking is to level the playing field by ensuring equal opportunities for quality education for all. Therefore, there must be systematic and concrete action to stop neglecting children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Research cautions that there is no quick fix to overcoming the education crisis and solving inequality in the provision of education, as major intervening factors form a complex web of tangled issues.

But time may not be on our side. More concerted efforts across related ministries, local education authorities, schools and parents are urgently needed to ensure that quality education can be accessed by all children, regardless of their socioeconomic or geographic background.

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 The writer is a professor of teacher education at Widya Mandala Surabaya Catholic University.