As the news cycle unfolded, it turns out the 14-year-old is a victim of physical and verbal bullying not only by his schoolmates but also by some of his teachers. He shared in a press conference that his teacher would rip his school assignment to pieces.

The school principal, Bejo Pranoto, described him to media outlets as an “attention seeker” who would puke when he was called into the teachers’ room.

Also in June, a female student at a state high school in Nunukan, North Borneo, was reportedly slapped by a social studies teacher at school. Seeing the bruise on her face, her parents demanded that the teacher be removed from office as her daughter was scared to go to school again.

“We’ll leave it to the parents to see. Did the teacher hit the kid with a sense of hatred? Did the teacher hit her with full force? I don’t think so,” Akhmad, head of Nunukan Education Agency, said on Monday to try to mediate tensions, as quoted by Kompas.com.

Her mother Maslina is still fighting an uphill battle to get the teacher even sanctioned.

The nation’s attention has been recently put on Indonesian teachers, whose quality has been labeled “poor” by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) since 2015.

A World Bank report in 2020 has called for a “teacher reform” in Indonesia, saying that Indonesian teachers’ knowledge in language, math and pedagogy was very low compared with other countries.

But beyond falling short in educational quality, these new cases show that many teachers, who are often referred to as students' “second parents”, are also lacking in their emotional abilities to connect with the students as well.

All too common

Discussions about bad teachers at Indonesian schools are usually shared between students, with many often tolerating inappropriately behaved teacher.

“There’s this math teacher who, when someone makes a joke at class, would slam the student’s desk and smudge their faces with a whiteboard eraser,” 17-year-old Nayla, who prefers to go by a pseudonym, told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday about her teacher at a state high school in Bandung.

Nayla expounded more on her other teachers, from an Indonesian language teacher who would make others uncomfortable by romantically pairing two students together to another math teacher who would get unreasonably angry when a boy wears a beaded bracelet, saying “They’re for girls.”

Asked whether Nayla or her friends ever tried to report teachers with such behavior to the school’s counseling and guidance teachers, she simply said no.

But these counseling and guidance (BK) teachers are not exempt from being the perpetrators in certain situations.

Marsha, also not her real name, recalled her experience when she was trying to graduate from high school back in 2020.

“My friends and I suddenly got called into the BK teachers’ room when this one teacher somehow knew that we didn’t like her, and she threatened not to let us get to our preferred university,” the 21-year-old told the Post.

This teacher, she added, let other teachers know about the situation to make it harder for her and friends. To this day, she remembered crying with her friends about it back in high school in Bandung.

Child psychologist Annelia Sari Sani said such cases are common among people who have come to seek her aid.

“What’s unfortunate is that these people in the education institutions often downplay the bullying cases the students experienced,” Annelia said, adding that the teachers are often in denial about the severity of the situation.

Annelia recalled one incident where a principal of a boarding school, after being confronted by the victim’s parents about the bullying, only coldly replied “That’s normal, it’ll make the kid have better mental strength.”

“Even in the situations when the teacher is the bully, they would often say that they were only joking around,” Annelia added.

A need for change

On the heels of the recent bullying cases, government officials and experts have asked for more serious action for these students.

“If the bullying case really involved the teachers, and it led to the arson incident, that means it’s directed toward the institution itself. The student [in Temanggung] had lost his trust in his school as a whole educational institution,” Syaiful Huda, chairman of House of Representatives Commission X overseeing education, said on July 2, as quoted by detik.com.

Huda said the Education, Culture, Research and Technology Ministry and the Temanggung Education Agency needed to be involved in mitigating further accidents from happening.

“I believe this arson case is only the tip of the iceberg in school bullying cases,” he added.

Education observer and former commissioner of the Indonesian Child Protection Commission (KPAI) Retno Listyarti lamented such cases given the existing Education and Culture Ministerial Regulation (Permendikbud) No. 82/2015 on the prevention of and countermeasures against acts of violence in educational institutions.

“If schools actually implemented the regulation, such acts of violence should’ve been prevented,” Retno told the Post.

The regulation states that schools can establish an antiviolence task force that includes teachers, parents and students as representatives, create a complaint system or involve psychologists to help with the victims.

But these all require students to open up, which is found to be quite hard given that bullying itself is often disparaged either by teachers or the victim’s parents.

“Usually, my clients came when they already had physical problems connected to the bullying they received,” Annelia shared. Those problems, she said, range from constant stomach ache to repeated headaches. Some were even sent only when the parents found out about the bruises they had.

The recurrent cases of bullying by or involving teachers call for a bigger, structural change in Indonesia’s teachers’ recruitment and the government’s treatment of educators, said education expert Indra Charismiadji.

“This is a systemic problem. All studies show that our teachers’ quality is lacking,” Indra said.

“Many of them do not have good remuneration, so how can we expect high-quality teaching and social capability toward students from such inhumane pay?” he said.

When teachers are prosperous and thrive in the educational system, he added, then it can lead to a better crop of teachers that understand their students’ behavior and emotions better.

“This needs fixing, but it’ll take a long time,” Indra said.

— Suherdjoko in Semarang contributed to this story.

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