In Indonesia, education is
often portrayed as the great social panacea, a universal cure for social ills
from political ignorance to social inequality. “Dasar manusia gak
berpendidikan!” (“You uneducated human being!”) or “sekolah lagi sana!”
(“[you should] go to school again!) are phrases many Indonesians often use in
response to snarky social media commenters, or to news of corrupt politicians,
lawbreakers, and juvenile delinquents. The implication, of course, is that if
only these people were educated enough then their actions would not have
happened or could at least be redeemed.
This attention to the redemptive powers of
education is not isolated to the everyday logic of Indonesian citizens.
Government development policies, along with numerous NGOs, have often used
educational programs as a spearhead to combat “underdevelopment” in communities
on the fringes of Indonesia. Indeed, Paul Gellert has argued
that the prevailing top-down developmentalist approach recalls the Soeharto
regime, now fused with a new cosmopolitan neoliberal ideology. The result is a
mixture of nationalism (teetering on full blown
hyper-nationalism) with a heightened degree of individualism, blind
optimism and an intense desire to be part of the global community. Such an
approach appeals to the urban middle class, due to its supposed effectiveness
in producing the sort of individuals needed for Indonesia’s economic progress.
But what does it look like at the fringes of
Indonesia, in areas lacking much of the basic infrastructure of urban and Javan
areas, and where communities have different ideas about individual success and
wellbeing? In this post I want to provide a snapshot of the problems of
Indonesia’s education system as they appear in the district of Hitadipa, deep
within the mountains of Papua.
Hitadipa is, by the standards of the Papuan
highlands, reasonably well-connected with other communities. A gravel road
connects it to the nearest town, Sugapa. Solar powered electricity, which
automatically dies off every day around 9:30pm, was recently introduced to the
area. Basic healthcare remains minimal if not non-existent. Churches are a
powerful local force, as they help to provide many of these services, with some
additional help from the central and local government.
There is one school that serves the district—but
only until year 9, forcing students who wish to continue their studies to go to
Sugapa, about an hour’s ride by motorbike. Of course, many do not have the
privilege of this modern transportation. Education, as a number of young people
I met in Hitadipa believe, will provide them access to future successes. To
many, this means getting a good local job, typically in the government or
church: teachers, church leaders, and doctors, along with village chiefs and
elders, are highly respected there.
The central and local governments have been pushing
higher quality formal education, particularly in relation to the curriculum and
the processes of teaching and learning, as one immediate response to
underdevelopment in communities like Hitadipa. What’s clearly missing, however,
is consideration of whether education should be contextualised and tailored for
people living in these remote areas of Indonesia.
Almost all of the young people at Hitadipa have
been educated until year 9. A relatively high number of them continue
their schooling to senior high school (years 10–12) in Sugapa. A lucky few have
managed to go on to university in Jayapura, the provincial capital, or even to
universities in Java, often choosing Jakarta or Yogyakarta (both options having their downsides in
the form of the racial discrimination experienced by Papuan students in Java.)
Access to higher education is a big enough issue,
yet the problems extend farther down than this. Many of the young people from
the highlands opt to return to their villages or hometowns either because they
want to help develop their local communities or be near their families. This
seemingly selfless act also illustrates the complexity of their ideas of
success and well-being, which are perhaps more rooted in community ideals than
those of the more urban, cosmopolitan counterparts for which the Indonesian
education system is geared.
Success for highland youth is underpinned by their
familial and community relations, which sustain and expand their social capital
within their communities. Maria, 22, who recently graduated from a university
in Bandung, West Java, and is now back home living with her parents in
Hitadipa, told me:
“I just recently finished my university degree in
IT from Bandung, West Java, but I came back to Hitadipa and the only job that
is available for me here is to help my parents, to take care of the farm. Even
in Sugapa, where the local government has been looking for educated young
people, the competition is so hard that I don’t think that I’ll get a job.”
Maria’s grievances reflect how the education she
has received is disconnected from what she needs. Papuans are educated for a
lifestyle that the central government perceives as more modern and more
appropriate for a 21st century society. But in remote areas, the
vast cultural and socioeconomic differences often render the “modern” education
that they have received from cities pointless.
Education as a systematically enforced societal
“upgrade” denies these young people the success that the education system has
at many times pledged. Thus, when educating people living in the peripheries,
the differences, complexities and nuances of their lives raises the question:
for whom and for what purpose are they being educated?
In the Indonesian context, to have educational
programs that adapt to local conditions presents a direct challenge to the
current education system. Providing a contextualised educational program is not
only to resist a hegemony of knowledge of what it means to be successful and
modern, as defined by the Indonesian government. More than that, it is to push
back against centralised forms of development that can and have marginalised
already marginalised communities—“development” that has provided these
communities with the things we think they need,
rather than what they actually need.
This is not to say that Indonesian governments,
both central and local, have not attempted to provide more contextualised,
relevant and decentralised educational programs. Since 1987 Indonesia’s
education system through a small national curriculum supplement has introduced muatan
lokal (local content) or mulok, roughly translated into local
curriculum subjects. These mulok, regulated and managed by local
government educational bodies, including the local government of
Papua, focus on the preservation of local languages, arts and
cultures.
There is of course nothing wrong with this. In a
world where local cultures, arts, languages are slowly being steamrolled by “modernity”, the
preservation of local ways of being is crucial for local communities to
maintain their identities and values. Yet with mulok being only one
supplement subject within the national curriculum, it is insufficient for these
fringe communities in confronting their changing socio-economic realities,
especially when these realities are being constantly deconstructed and
reconstructed by the onslaught of centralised development programs. The school
in Hitadipa, for instance, only uses its mulok to teach the local
language. This is praiseworthy but inadequate. Indonesia’s national curriculum
can provide much more than this, not only for Hitadipa or Papua, but also for
other areas as well.
The whole national curriculum itself needs to be
contextualised for its students. Alongside having the local educational bodies
add additional mulok that looks at the local history, socio-economic
conditions, and politics, this would also mean having a flexible national
curriculum that provides core subjects such as sciences, mathematics, reading,
writing etc., which must not only engage in the universal knowledge, values and
issues that the curriculum promotes but must also respond to the local
realities of the students.
One example that the Indonesian government may
learn from in educating its rural communities is a pioneering initiative from
one of its very own citizens, Saur Marlina Manurung, or often known as Butet
Manurung. Through her school Sokola Rimba, Butet
Manurung (whom I confidently proclaim as the Indonesian version of the famed
Brazilian critical educator Paulo Freire) provided
education to the Orang Rimba community living deep within Bukit Dua Belas
National Park. The content of the educational program itself was simple: to
teach these marginalised communities living deep within the forest to read,
write and count.
The how and why is much more interesting. Butet not
only approached the method of teaching and learning from an anthropological
perspective, in which the local culture was at the centre of the pedagogy, but
also worked together with the Orang Rimba in how these knowledges can be useful
for them rather than such knowledges simply being imposed.
Pushing her educational and political agenda
further, the curriculum and teaching and learning processes of Sokola Rimba are
also contextualised with the socio-economic conditions of the Orang Rimba. With
illegal logging and land grabbing an immense problem for their community, the
Orang Rimba suffered immensely from their lack of literacy and numeracy. In her
book about her experiences with Sokola
Rimba, Butet noted that the Orang Rimba would often be deceived in
signing papers, only to later regretfully realise that they just signed a land
sale agreement. Although the education she provided seemed very basic, by
providing a socio-political purpose for learning on how to read, write and
count contextualises their education within their socio-economic realities.
The tricky part of Butet’s initiative, of course,
is how to institutionalise the innovations presented by Sokola Rimba within
government educational policies. A radical change in the national curriculum
towards more contextualised content will require a massive effort by the
government to understand the local contexts of students. This would not only
require deep and continuous partnerships with local communities, but also with
the invaluable knowledge and skills of anthropologists and rural sociologists
(who have at times been sidelined by Indonesian policy makers, or used to merely support and promote
central government development policies).
But on a more foundational level, such a new
approach to schooling would also require a fundamental shift in how the purpose
of education and its relationship to “modernity” is understood in Indonesia. It
means embracing the idea that being a modern human being must not necessarily fully equate with
the ideals of urban life, and that success extends much farther than
simply getting a good office job in big cities.
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