Reality of Our Education

As one of developing country in the world, our country, Indonesia faces many typical challenges on its development, such as economy, education, and health. For many years our country still struggles to solve those problems and improve the quality of services in economy, education, and health. In fact, the National Development program do not run well as expected because there are many problems challenging it, one of them is the quality of its human resources.

Education plays a key-role in developing human resource of our country. A country will develop steadily if its educational system runs well. Actually, our country’s education program is seen as a good one. The prospect of our education system is well designed. In fact, it faces many challenges that interrupt its success, for example; lack of professional teachers, quality, poverty, infrastructure, etc. Therefore, our country is left behind other developing countries.

The compulsory education planned by the government, stating that Indonesian citizens have to attend the nine-year education in elementary and junior high school, doesn’t run well as expected. The main factor supporting the fail of compulsory education in Indonesia is economy crisis. Due to the economy crisis, many people live in poverty so that they have to think twice if they want to send their children to school. The poor financial condition suffered by many Indonesian people makes the equalization of education in Indonesia doesn’t run well.

A survey conducted in Indramayu by a team from Bogor Agricultural Institute (IPB) and BAPPENAS in 2009  showed that approximately 50 % of the respondents (parents) were not satisfied to the quality of compulsory education in Indonesia (SD and SMP). Meanwhile, 70 % of the respondents were not satisfied to the school fees. It happens because many families’ income is not actually high. Therefore, they prefer to spend their money to fulfill their daily needs rather than to pay their children school fees. This problem leads to the children’s dropout from their school. According to the survey, the main reasons why they asked their children to stop schooling can be divided into two categories – economy and non-economy. The economy factors include; they do not earn enough money to fulfill the school fees which increase from-year-to-year, if they have more than two children, they cannot afford to fund their education fees together, etc. The non-economy factors, for instance, their children lose their spirit in studying, they thought that their children have already enough education, and their children are afraid of friends and school committees.

Based on the reasons above, I do agree that the government, in this case the Ministry of Education, has to find out a way to minimize students' drop out rate. Although the government has helped them with Bantuan Operasional Sekolah (BOS), in fact, it does not work well since they also want the improvement quality of education service.

Although I am not an education expert, i think that providing the good human resources will be the good input for supporting our National Development Program. With those creative and innovative resources, the goal of the National Development Program, especially in education, seems to be achieved well. I can assume that if the goals’ of education – the good output from education process - is achieved well, our country will develop steadily in many major aspects such as economy, health, industry, etc. Therefore, we can also compete better with other countries in the world.

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