Keeping Hopes High for Better Education in

Indonesia
By Anies Baswedan

The right to education has been enshrined in the preamble of Indonesia’s constitution, obliging
the government to provide good quality education for its citizens. The provision comes second,
following only the mandate to create prosperity for all and joining the global effort to create
world peace. Such is the importance of education in the country.

But rarely, if at all, is there debate about substantive issues regarding education, such as
eradicating corruption, improving the quality of teachers and their pay, and on implementing a
better accreditation system. The debates that do take place mostly concern basic issues which
should have been settled two or three decades ago, such as whether students need a centralized
final exam or whether they need to be taught science and math in elementary school. It appears
that policy makers in the education sector have always got their priorities wrong.

But then again, priorities are not something that the country’s bureaucracy is good at setting. It
was only recently that the government decided to increase the budget for education, with a 7.5%
increase pledged by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono for next year. Even after an increase
is made, education has to compete with other sectors in getting more budget. The Defense and
Public Works ministries get a bigger share, with Education coming third.

Living up to its reputation as the largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia spends a large
amount on religious education on nearly 4,000 state Islamic education institutions across the
archipelago. The government allocation for religious education in 2012 was 31.5 trillion rupiah
($2.74 billion) for the Islamic Education division at the Religious Affairs Ministry—of the total
41.7 trillion rupiah ($3.62 billion dollars) budget for the ministry—while it allocated 66 trillion
rupiah ($5.74 billion) in budget for the Education and Culture Ministry.

Mr. Yudhoyono may have promised to increase spending for education, but with corruption
remaining endemic in the country, the promise of quality education for all rings hollow to many
of the poor who rely on government for their schooling.

Education remains the most corrupt sector in the country. Indonesia Corruption Watch found that
in 2011, the education sector contributed the most cases of graft. Of 436 cases handled by law
enforcers, 12.4 percent, or 54 cases, were associated with corruption in the education sector.

From the survey, the anti-graft watchdog found that corruption worsened as the government
spent more for education. The more spent, the more stolen.

The saddest thing about corruption is that often the money stolen is allocated for the poor, such
as budget earmarks for the school operational assistance fund and the social aid fund meant for
construction of school buildings in the country’s poor and far-flung regions.
The rich can vote with their feet. Children from affluent families can go to private or
international-standard schools and get a quality education on par with what their peers could
enjoy in Singapore or Shanghai. Children from poor families have nowhere else to go. Most of
the time, children from poor families have to travel for miles only to find out that the roof of
their school building has collapsed, that their math teachers fail to come to class due to having to
work a second job, or that the question sheets for their final exam are stuck somewhere in an
airport hangar due to possible graft and incompetence at the local education office.

It is very unfortunate that the problems plaguing the education system are emerging right when
Indonesia is expected to reap the benefits of the demographic dividend. With nearly 60 percent
of its population now under the age of 40, Indonesia has one of the youngest demographic
profiles in the world. With the youth bulge, Indonesia has the potential to rise above its current
developing-nation status and become a challenging nation. But with the army of uneducated and
poorly educated youth making up the largest part of the bulge, Indonesia has instead a bomb
waiting to explode when economic growth fails to generate enough jobs.

Not all hope is lost. When the government falls short in performing its duty, the community
picks up the slack. Indonesia, after all, is a country known for its gotongroyong ethics, the
equivalent of American civic culture. Many in the community start their own initiatives, getting
their hands dirty by training young educators to be sent to some of the country’s remotest areas.
Others start an alternative form of schooling that does away with the government-sponsored
curriculum by bringing students closer to nature. Believing that the current curriculum does not
teach enough science and math, some educators set up schools that train the country’s future best
scientists.

Many others have tapped into the immense power of the Internet and social media. Earlier this
year, a website was set up to hear complaints about which school buildings need repairs or where
funds have allegedly been stolen. Some tech-savvy initiators, armed only with Twitter and
Facebook, have mobilized volunteers to set up classes around the country to teach students about
things that their underpaid teachers don’t.

In a place where people are used to broken promises, that looks like a beacon of hope.

Anies Baswedan is president of Paramadina University and an education reformer. He regularly

writes about public policy, Islam and politics. Mr. Baswedan created a program called Teaching
Indonesia that recruits and trains young Indonesians to work as teachers in remote,
impoverished provinces across the country’s more than 17,000 islands.