Indonesia: Exploring the improbable nation (Elizabeth Pisani, 2014)
As part of a new resolution to learn more about the contexts of each (of my) doctoral researcher(s), I am now reading Pisani’s account of travelling around Indonesia in 2011-2012. As I do so, I am mindful of everything Fitri has told me about her professional and personal world over the years. And I am aware that I am responding to the book as an outsider reading the account of someone who although an outsider has lived and worked in Indonesia for more years than she has lived anywhere else. So, for sure, the nuggets of information I highlight on in her published highlights from her travels are just that, things that I find interesting. I am looking forward to listening more attentively than ever to Fitri’s account in coming weeks and to have my points of interest challenged, extended, clarified, etc 🙂
Meanwhile, here’s one quotation that struck me:
“Given the geopolitical challenges of this scattered nation, it’s something of a miracle that Indonesia actually manages to educate 55 million children a year. Nine out of ten children get through junior high school, and almost everyone aged between fifteen and twenty-four is functionally literate. More impressive still, Indonesia has the smallest number of pupils per teacher of any country in its income bracket. Indeed, if you look at international league tables, class sizes are smaller in Indonesia than they are in the United States or Britain. And yet Indonesia kids consistently come close to the bottom in international tests of reading comprehension, science and maths. In the internationally standardised TIMSS tests in maths, just 0.4 per cent of Indonesian fifteen-year-olds reached the ‘advanced’ benchmark score indicating that they could organise information, analyse it and draw conclusions from it. More than half did not even make it to the ‘low’ benchmark indicating that they have ‘some knowledge of whole numbers and decimals, operations and basic graphs’. Of 65 countries included in the PISA international tests for fifteen-year-olds in 2012, Indonesia came 60th in reading and 64th maths and science. Just 0.3 per cent of Indonesian students made it past the advanced benchmark in that maths test. Not one of the universities in the world’s fourth most populous nation is rated as among the 100 best in Asia.” (pp.159-160)
Fitri, what would be your take on the situation? Impossible to summarise here maybe …..
Khwan, be warned, am reading up on Thailand too so expect in due course some provocative quotation !!!
Where next?
Many thanks, Fitri. As always, your insider understanding of the complexities reminds me of the need for caution when reading – as an outsider – a brief portrait (written for particular purposes) of the context in question.
BTW, the SM3T programme sounds especially interesting.
This quotation is really interesting and yes provocative 😀 😀 And here is what I can possibly say about this situation…
It’s so true that we are geographically and geopolitically scattered (as the biggest archipelago in the world with 17,500 islands, what can we say 😀 ). Educating millions of children in those scattered islands often with difficult access from other major islands is really challenging. It has been a major issue in our national education policy for a very very long time. With the unequal development and distribution of educational infrastructure and manpower in those islands (the so called Java and outside Java Areas) and between the rural and urban areas, yes, it is indeed a miracle 🙂
About literacy. My government endeavours to improve our people’s literacy through many ways i.e. formal schooling, informal, and non-formal education. We have Kejar (kelompok belajar) or non-formal study groups where people of all ages can learn to read and write and other lessons. Our government also encourages university students to do a community work in a rural area so that they can teach the people to read, write, and to teach them about sanitation and other life skills (I did mine in a rural village about 60 miles from my university in 1997 🙂 ). So, the level of literacy does not reflect only the formal schooling only but also other government programs.
About the ratio of teacher – students. Yes this is right that in average the class sizes are smaller than those of in the similar income brackets. The ratios of students : teachers are 18 : 1 for the primary schools, and 16:1 for the secondary schools in Indonesia. However, teachers are unequally distributed (as also the population of Indonesia in general) that class sizes may vary immensely. I will take primary education as an example. We may have a class of 40-45 pupils in a school in one area, while only 4-6 in another school in another area. My mother-in-law used to teach in a rural school before she retired, and this school only had few students 🙂 Many of the parents in that village tend to send their children to the city (to the more affluent schools), which is only about 2 miles away. With the development of transportation, this things happen. When I was a child, parents simply sent their children to a school nearby.
Then, we may have a primary school with plenty of teachers and even with some specialist teachers such as for English, Religion Education, and PE. Meanwhile, another school may only have 3 teachers teaching the overall 6 year groups. Quite improbable to imagine 😀 To illustrate, we have about 1,4 million teachers all over Indonesia, but 650,000 of them are in Java, and the rest are in all other 17,499 islands (I am exaggerating as more than half of those islands are inhabited 🙂 and often really small). So, it’s quite (or really) complicated talking about education in my country. Yes, we have so many teachers, but many of our schools have so few teachers that a teacher may handle two classes simultaneously, especially in the rural areas. This is also what motivated Anies Baswedan, now Indonesian Minister of Education (appointed in 2014), to start Indonesia Mengajar (Indonesia Teaching) in 2009. This foundation recruits Indonesian best university graduates to teach in the rural areas all over Indonesia. Here is the link to their website (Bahasa Indonesia only, maybe you can use google translate to help, though not precise, just to get the global picture of what they do).
http://indonesiamengajar.org/
And Mr. Baswedan’s speech in TEDx is below: (Sorry it’s in Bahasa Indonesia, but it has picture illustration which might help)
Our government now also has a programme so called SM3T (Sarjana Mendidik di Daerah Terdepan, Terluar, dan Tertinggal) or Graduates Teaching in the Front line, Border, and Under Developed areas). This program recruits fresh graduates to teach in those ‘untouched’ areas.
About PISA score. Yes, our children scored low in this test, but this does not mean that those children are low achievers. Muchlas Samani, the rector of one of major universities in Indonesia, mentioned that Indonesian students achieved poorly in PISA because they werenot familiar with the type of questions requiring higher order of thinking skills (analysing, synthesising, evaluating, and creating) (2014). Those students did really well in the national exam with most items requiring lower order of thinking skills (memorising, understanding, and applying), because they are trained to do so. Therefore, if Indonesia change the emphasis and focus of our education, the students might do well in the test (PISA).
About the absence of Indonesian universities in the top 100 Asian league:
One of Indonesian universities appear in the top 100 of QS University Ranking, but only one 🙁
http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/asian-university-rankings/2014#sorting=rank+region=+country=+faculty=+stars=false+search=
As the immensely populous country, we are supposed to have more on the board. This problem is probably due to the fact that Indonesian universities fail to achieve high score some of key assessment components such as citations of papers, papers published by faculty members, and the number of international students and international faculty. Indonesian government has done some efforts to improve this, such as to merge of higher education division with research and technology division of the department of education, forming one new ministry i.e. Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education, with high hope that Indonesian faculty members will do more research and publish more. There are also incentives (quite lucrative ones) for those publishing in international journals and also trainings for those aiming to publish their papers in the journals.
So that’s a bit I can say about what happens in my country with regard to the citation 🙂 🙂