INDONESIA-EDUCATION Indonesia focuses on character building in education reform

Record ID: 535523

  • Title: INDONESIA-EDUCATION Indonesia focuses on character building in education reform
  • Date: 3rd December 2014
  • Summary: JAKARTA, INDONESIA (RECENT - NOVEMBER 11, 2014) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF WORLD BANK'S SENIOR EDUCATION ECONOMIST, SAMER AL-SAMARRAI TALKING TO REPORTER (SOUNDBITE) (English) THE WORLD BANK'S SENIOR EDUCATION ECONOMIST, SAMER AL-SAMARRAI SAYING: "Addressing the weaknesses in the formal education system is only one part of the solution. Indonesia really has to do something about
  • Embargoed: 18th December 2014 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Indonesia
  • Country: Indonesia
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVAA15PPSEWWKHBZ4LSJNO1YY6B1
  • Story Text: Sitting in groups and engaging in active conversations, students at a state primary school in Jakarta are one of the first batches of students participating in an ongoing pilot project that is likely to bring unprecedented changes to Indonesia's future education system.
    The planned nationwide education reform orientates towards character building with moral and religious studies and focuses less on science and skills. It also mixes subjects together with the hopes of promoting critical learning.
    "The future requires more than just being a specialist, future requires generalists who are learners, you can switch fields, you change professions but the key is to be a learner. If you are a learner you are able to compete in the future and yes, the core competence needs to be there, without the core competence you cannot to switch or to move from one responsibility to another. So that is a type of requirement that we would like to equip our children, our students," Indonesian Minister of Culture and Elementary and Secondary Education Anies Baswedan told Reuters in an interview at his office.
    About 6,000 schools, mainly in capital Jakarta, have participated in the new curriculum. President Joko Widodo is hoping to roll out the programme countrywide soon, which will involve 218,000 schools across the archipelago.
    Arkalodi Devin is one of the students studying under the new programme.
    "Before, subjects were not mixed together and the teacher would teach us different subjects one by one, but now all subjects are being mixed," he said.
    When asked if it's difficult to learn, he replied "No, not at all."
    But some parents said they preferred the old curriculum.
    "In my opinion the old curriculum was easier, but now children must learn about subjects that are mixed together, they must learn from all the subjects, even though there's only a little bit of each subject covered in each class," a mother of a fifth-grader, Sarti Darise said.
    The pilot project kicked was off last year by former Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's administration. It was strongly backed by Widodo's who has said he hopes to bring down country's high corruption rates by instilling moral education amongst children.
    Indonesia's education ranked second last in among the 65 member and partner countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2012, an annual report said, highlighting the country's education is falling behind its economy development pace.
    A Boston Consulting Group report earlier this year warned of a shortage of talent in Indonesia, putting the onus on investors to find and mould their own workforce to better tap into Southeast Asia's largest economy.
    According to the report, "Indonesia graduates about 30,000 engineers per year, but the economy requires about 50,000, a 40 percent shortfall. By 2025, the engineering shortage will rise to more than 70 percent."
    World Bank's senior education economist in Jakarta said it would take decades for effects to trickle down into the work force.
    "Addressing the weaknesses in the formal education system is only one part of the solution. Indonesia really has to do something about the labour force and the people already in the labour force. You know, reforms or improvements in the education system will take 15, 20 years to actually work through to have a big impact in the labour force," said Samer Al-Samarrai.
    As an effort to improve education quality, Indonesia has also rolled out an ambitious teacher certification law in 2005 that mandated raising the wages and quality of educators.
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