So recently I just had this little realisation. I was about to call it an epiphany but I thought using that word would be a dramatisation, so for the moment let's just call it a minor realisation.
So I live in Indonesia which if you don't know already, is a developing country. We have so many things to be proud about like our astonishingly diverse culture and our unique culinary taste. But education isn't one of those things. Education is far from those things. Like our education sucks.
I don't exactly know the reason to that. I mean I haven't done a research or anything but I might have some ideas and hypotheses to the situation.
- The human resource, the gap between islands
Firstly, I think the problem comes from the not-so-advanced framework of the whole education system itself. Indonesia comes 4th globally in terms of population. There's about 250 million of us. And yet, our education system doesn't have enough human resource to support the whole nation's demand.
To add more pain to that fact, out of those Educators, not all of them are "qualified enough" as "proper teachers". As I said before, I cannot provide any researches (yet), but as somebody who's been studying here since Kindergarten, I can assure you that the actual conditions are indeed like that. Probably not because the teachers lack knowledge. But it's simply because the teachers lack in terms of methods. They lack the ability to be able to present their knowledge in such a way so that students feel excited, happy, and evermore curious. This is very important in my opinion because if teachers are able to create that sense of excitement in students' minds, the students themselves would have more urgency and commitment towards studying the subject. They wouldn't be studying for the sake of "having good grades", but they would be studying because they want to learn, they want to know more. They would be studying because they simply are happy to study. I think in the long term, this would pay off massively because if students are excited to learn and enjoy every bit of the learning process, the chances of revolutionary ideas in the future emerging from nowadays students will be higher. To me, that is indeed a very exciting idea.
But the list of problems don't end there. The next problem is the fact that the country itself is an archipelago. This makes distribution slightly more complicated. That condition creates an imbalance in the education quality and workforce availability in urban places like Java and significantly poorer places like Papua. In Java, it's very rare to see a school with insufficient facilities. But in regions like Papua, an ill-facilitated school might be considered "standard" and "sufficient" there. Things don't stop getting worse in rural and remote areas. It's not rare to see a school with only a few classes and perhaps one teacher having to teach several subjects. This kind of illustration just goes to show how huge the education gap is between different islands in Indonesia.
- The Funding
Indonesia actually allocates 20% of its budget towards education. But somehow, it just hasn't translated into results as fast as anyone would like it to. The amount of teachers is still below minimum, most of them are underpaid, school facilities aren't balanced throughout Indonesia, the results just aren't there yet. This reality made me wonder the reasons as to why despite the amount of funding from government, education quality hasn't improved that much. I've looked out for the answers on the internet and turns out, there's a variety of answers out there. Some say it's due to the corruption running on government levels, and some others say it's due to the ineffective and unfocused funding from the government. But whatever the reason is, something is definitely wrong in our funding and/or our distribution.
- The Curriculum
As a current senior high school student in Yogyakarta ( senior high school is like our "Upper-Secondary" Education so it comes after primary school and junior high school), I do feel that the education that I have to endure everyday is quite demanding. One of the reasons is because we have to study so many subjects that we aren't even interested in, and more importantly, subjects that aren't necessary for the field that we want to excel at. So for example, even though I want to study and work in the field of Neuroscience, I still have to study subjects like Civics, History, and Literature. Some of you that are reading this might think that's not such a bad thing. Well to be honest, perhaps you're right. But it becomes simply a lot worse when I tell you that not only are we required to study it, but we are also required to do really good at it. This, to me, is definitely one of the reasons why some students find it hard to excel at the subjects that they need to learn or sometimes even excel at any subject at all.
- The Students itself
So from the last 3 points, you might think that I made this blogpost so that I could rant as hard and as loud as I want to my government about how bad the education system in my country is. But no, that's not exactly what I want to do. Because I am a part of this system, I also realise that myself and students like me also fall into one of the reasons as to why Indonesia's education system isn't as good as it's supposed to be. A lot of students in Indonesia (yes, I am included) sometimes just don't have the right attitude and mindset when it comes to education and studying in order to be educated. A lot of students just study in order to get good grades so that they could apply for a good institution in their next education level. So for these kind of students, all they study for are the numbers. They're satisfied if there numbers are good. Again, when I say a lot I do mean a lot but I am not trying to say that every single student in Indonesia falls in this category. There are a lot of reasons for this. And one of them is probably the fact that even a lot of Indonesian parents encourages this mindset and attitude towards education. They want their students to get good grades so that they wouldn't have to worry about them getting a good institution for their next education level. In my opinion I think it's already time to change this sort of mindset. Students are supposed to study for mastery. And by that I mean students are supposed to study the things that they love, the things that they're passionate about so that they could excel in it until they reach a certain degree of mastery in which they could contribute in that particular field for the sake of many people. However, that is not the reality. And I think, among all of the problems that I've mentioned here, this one is the hardest to solve.
So, the conclusion is, there are still many problems that myself and my country have to deal with before we can reach a level of education good enough to compete with the global competition. And of course, realising those problems is the first step for us towards solving it.
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