Diaspora, ‘brain drain’ and education

The recent Congress of Indonesian Diaspora focused on the collaborations between Indonesia and diasporic Indonesian communities around the world. An article published in The Jakarta Post on Aug. 20, 2013, lauds this conference because collaborations between the Indonesian government, various business circles and diasporic communities may boost Indonesia’s economy. 

A strong emphasis is placed on pulang kampung or “going home”. The conference organizers may have chosen this theme after careful consideration on the assumption that Indonesian communities living abroad may someday return to their homeland, or to contributing in their own ways to their country of origin.

The ties that bind all Indonesians living in Indonesia and abroad are sinuous and based on a concept that Benedict Anderson calls “imagined communities”. In his theory of nationhood, Anderson posits that nations are drawn together in their collective memory of a shared past, to truly “believe in” their nation and, therefore, to act in its interests. In this respect, history and rituals are essential to instill nationalist pride in Indonesian citizens.

In every country, the flag is symbolic of a nation. It represents a country at the United Nations and is especially significant as a beacon of independence for countries with a colonial past such as Indonesia. This flag is flown during solemn ceremonies across the country during our Aug. 17 Independence Day celebrations, from kindergartens to a lavish event at the Presidential Palace. Similar ceremonies are also conducted every Monday at national schools around the country.

Such ceremonies, however, are not enough. Pride in being Indonesian can only be created through education and a personal sense of belonging to a country that is also respected internationally. As a child growing up in Indonesia, I remember being taught to recite the state ideology of Pancasila (belief in one supreme God, humanism, nationalism, popular sovereignty and social justice) and our national motto of Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity). 

However, a deeper understanding and practical application of these principles was not emphasized in the schools that I attended.

School children and all Indonesian citizens should understand that these unifying principles are crucial to bringing our diverse country together. Our country’s diverse population, rich natural resources and cultural heritage are key aspects that have drawn international attention to this country.

As it is commonly understood, our younger generation is more enamored with popular culture, Facebook and Twitter rather than exploring the rich resources that our country has to offer. Members of our younger generation, who may go abroad to study or begin their careers abroad, need to be armed with this significant knowledge to help promote our country, and to draw them back to Indonesia after they have obtained education and experience overseas. Even if they choose to stay abroad as members of Indonesian diasporic communities, their pride in their country of origin will allow them to maintain close political, economic and social ties with Indonesia.

Opportunities in Indonesia for our diaporic student communities should also be an important factor for the government to focus on in order to reduce a “brain drain”. According to Professor Yohannes Surya, an educator who has groomed our country’s best minds to win various medals in physics and mathematics Olympiads, Indonesia is thriving in brilliant young minds that need to maximize their potential to help build Indonesia’s science and technology sectors.

Surya, himself a brilliant physicist, went on to pursue a master’s and doctorate in physics at the College of William and Mary in the United States after obtaining his undergraduate degree at the University of Indonesia (UI) in 1986. He attained his postgraduate degrees in 1990 and 1994, respectively, and received the highest honors possible for both.

Having completed his tertiary education, Surya began working as a consultant in theoretical physics at the US Nuclear Physics Center in Virginia. Although this work earned him a green card to stay in the US as a permanent resident, he decided to return to Indonesia.

Contrary to the prevailing belief that those who graduate overseas tend to stay abroad, Surya claimed that most scientists who obtained their degrees abroad “long to return to Indonesia, provided that they can contribute their skills and research to help their country”.

One of his former students, Hendra Kwee, who participated in the International Physics Olympiad in 1997 and earned his doctorate in 2007 from the College of William and Mary, is now back in Indonesia to train the current Indonesian physics team for the Olympiad. Others like him would be committed to returning to their homeland when there were laboratories and research centers for them to develop and contribute their skills, he added.

What Surya and the nation’s other scientists need now is public support to make his dreams a reality. To his satisfaction, the Education and Culture Ministry has pledged to provide scholarships for the winners of the International Physics Olympiad. Other initiatives from the private sector will also encourage these exceptional students to return to their homeland.

As Indonesia becomes an important global economic player, it is necessary for the government to gear its efforts toward educating the nation and creating opportunities for Indonesia’s best and brightest minds that make up part of the Indonesian diasporic communities. 

After all, as Professor Surya reminded us, “Education is the key to a nation’s advancement. These students deserve the attention and support of various organizations, corporations and the government. In time, they will definitely push Indonesia to the forefront of science and technology.

Aimee Darwis ;  

The writer, who earned her PhD in media studies at New York University, lectures at the University of Indonesia’s departments of communications and humanities. She is currently completing a course at Lemhannas

JAKARTA POST, 21 Agustus 2013

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Educating future Indonesians

A nation’s future of sustained economic growth depends very much on the quality of its human resources, and this is determined by the quality of education. 

Studies have also shown that education is a crucial factor in reducing income inequality, as can be seen in many Latin American countries. Investment in a nation’s education takes 10 to 15 years for a country to reap the benefits.

Since 2008, thanks to a constitutional amendment, spending on education has been set at 20 percent of the total budget. 

The budget for education in 2013 is nearly U$6 billion, which makes education one of the top seven recipients of state budget funds. Currently, there are approximately 59 million students, 3 million teachers and 330,000 schools.

So what does the Education and Culture Ministry do with a whopping $6 billion? Education and Culture Minister Mohammad Nuh, said in February this year that in 2007, 80 percent of the children who entered primary school graduated, but out of this number only 61 percent continued on to junior high. 

The minister went on to say that, of those who did enter junior high school, only 48 percent completed this stage of schooling and of this number only 21 percent continued to senior high. 

Of this 21 percent, only 10 percent graduated. Of the 10 percent who graduated, only 1.4 percent undertook tertiary education.

It was safe for the minister to talk about numbers in 2007, it was six years ago and a long time before he became education and culture minister. 

During the last decade, primary education enrolment rates have been impressive.

There is, however, more to education than just enrolment! Has the proportion of drop-outs also decreased dramatically since 2007?

Given that we are entering a demographic bonus, where there will be a large number of youths, which should be able to fuel our economic growth, have the enrolments produced a workforce that is now developing our economy?

A report released by the World Bank in March this year entitled Spending More or Spending Better: Improving Education Financing in Indonesia finds that, despite the large increase in education spending, the quality has not improved. 

According to the report, Indonesia’s performance in international tests has been disappointing; in fact, the country’s general scores were at the bottom of international assessments of learning achievements.

Apparently, when eighth grade Indonesian students were tested through Trends in International Mathematics and Science Studies (TIMSS), which is an international benchmark for mathematics and science, they performed significantly worse than students from Thailand and Malaysia.

The TIMSS test showed that not only are average scores low but that the share of students achieving the highest levels of performance is also very small, with only the top 20 percent of performers in Indonesia achieving at least an intermediate score. 

Only 3 percent achieved scores at the highest level and no students scored at the advanced level. In contrast, almost 50 percent of students in Thailand and Malaysia achieved at least the intermediate level, while 10 percent achieved high benchmarks and 1 percent achieved advanced levels.

The results show that average scores in 2003 and 2009 are not statistically very different in mathematics and science. Only reading scores improved. Even more worrying is the fact that, when researchers broke down results by socio-economic deciles, the inequality in access to quality education was glaringly obvious.

There was a significant difference in performance between the richest and poorest students in mathematics. Poor students performed significantly worse than rich students, and this difference has not improved since 2003.

So, where did all the money go? The same report found that a large share of the massive increase went to pay teachers’ salaries and teachers’ certification allowances. 

The increase in spending on salaries was driven by a fast increase in the total number of teachers, which continues to increase despite Indonesia already having one of the lowest student-teacher ratios in the world.

The teacher certification program almost doubled the pay of certified teachers through an allowance equivalent to a teacher’s basic pay. This allowance absorbed more than 2 percent of the state budget in 2009, even though only 30 percent of teachers were certified.

It is convenient to blame decentralization. One intrinsic problem is the attitude of our bureaucracy to the notion of public service. There is even rejection among much of the bureaucracy of the basic principle that the main task of civil servants is to serve the community that pays their wages.

Bureaucrats have been smart in serving whoever their masters are, so that their privileges as civil servants remain intact. With this framework of thinking, it is easy to see how budgets are used mainly for operational costs rather than servicing the community.

Political elites must agree to stop playing politics with education and to take education out of the political horse trading that takes place when new cabinets are formed. 

The minister in charge needs to be competent and not politically well connected just because a political party was promised the job for agreeing to be in the government’s coalition. This approach has cost us dearly!

We have a Master Plan for Acceleration and Expansion of Indonesian Economic Development (MP3EI), so why not have a Master Plan for Acceleration and Expansion of Indonesian Educational Development? 

Indonesia needs bridges and roads, but if we are to develop our economy, we desperately need skilled human resources. If we can plan infrastructure building for the next 15 years, why can we not do it for education when so much depends on it? 

If not, we will be importing doctors and engineers and continuing to export migrant workers (TKI).

Ratih Hardjono  ;   

A Former Journalist, Secretary-General of the Indonesian Community for Democracy (KID); She was a recipient of the Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard University, in the class of 1994

JAKARTA POST, 16 Juli 2013

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Education strategy and the philosophy of bicycle riding

Indonesia is a vast country that should not tolerate dilettantish national policy formulations, let alone in the field of education, which should always be perceived as the most important undertaking of human investment. With its population of 240 million people and abundant natural resources, it is a land that is badly in need of a state of the art education strategy.

Indonesia’s education strategy should be capable to withstand geopolitical shifts, yet, flexible enough for policy adjustments that may be called for by changes in the course of national development. We cannot undermine serious thoughts on such a strategy, as Indonesia, like all other countries, faces a future of mankind that will be marked as a risk society (Ulrich Beck) with tendencies really hard to predict.

The quintessence of education is to guarantee the inter-generational cultural relay race that consists of the transfer of previous “weather proven” knowledge and experiences, the critical communication over the here and now (Jürgen Habermas) and a dialogue about the future. 

In that regard education firstly has a conservative-conventional function: to prepare the next generations with integer basic capabilities (Ki Hajar Dewantara) in order to survive against nature and survive in relations with fellow humans (Sigmund Freud).

Therefore, it is our obligation to equip the next generations with an education in liberal arts that is historically proven; a correct mother tongue which in our case would be our national language, mathematics and natural sciences, history and geography and, not the least, ethics and discipline in order for individuals at large to be civilized in an increasingly pluralistic society. 

The second function is rather progressive-nonconventional: to open opportunities for the development of autonomous poietic capabilities (Engkoe Mohammad Sjafei) in order to cope with a future that no one knows how it would look like. Somehow generations of each era shall have to find their own problem solving if they want to survive (Han Feizi, Machiavelli). 

Older generations have the obligation to pass on their best knowledge and capabilities to the coming generations and also enlighten them with skills and training to discover, on their own, sophisticated methods and prudence that they would think adequate to cope with a risk society of the future, the trend of which is hard to predict.

The coming generations will become the more like an arrow that we shoot in a battle of civilizations whereby we cannot dictate where it should stuck. Most important, the coming generations will certainly define on their own what they are or will be, while we cannot convince them to retain what we now deem as our precious identity. We should not wonder if the future generations would find out on their own to love values what we hate, or the other way around — to hate norms what we love. We should also open a broad poietic sphere for youngsters to be creative by means of providing them with opportunities for artistic works (painting, singing, writing and crafts), sports and, increasingly recommendable, martial arts. 

Those capabilities are required for the next generations to train themselves to be skilled in independent analysis, self-evaluation and to deal autonomously out of the box, let alone out of our box. As the human future will be tight with technology which does not promise anything enduring nor certainty, the coming generations should be prepared to think and to act beyond the conventional frontiers and rely more on their own autonomous analytical capabilities to decide what they would deem fit to bringing them to a better life and to prevent setbacks (Flügel-Martinsen, Jenseits von Glauben und Wissen, 2011).

Wading across life in the future would be much like riding a bicycle in a terrain bumpy with all kinds of challenges and obstacles, some of them could be even devastating. In such a terrain one should not rely too much on others, as others would also have increasing problems of their own. If one rides a bicycle, there is little use to rely on anybody; one relies on one’s own bicycle and one’s own élan to accomplish track by track of history. Change that metaphor into real life then we get our most valuable reason in place of a bicycle, and get the real tough life to deal with instead of history. 

Still, once you ride the bicycle of history, keep paddling, because if you ever stop, you will get trapped in failure and the tragedy of life that will prevent you to stand up again, because history is only a one way path. To avoid the tragedies of history Indonesia really needs an able and solid government, and not one whose high ranking officials only offer apologies for fiascoes caused by their sheer incompetence or indecisiveness. 

The next general election in April 2014 should produce such a government, or else we would be bound for a deeper history of ignorance, which no reasonable nation would be willing to go into.

Budi0no Kusumohamidjojo ;  

Professor of Philosophy of Law

JAKARTA POST, 14 Mei 2013

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School, fraud and the sacrifice of Socrates

Two days after the story of the embarrassing administration of the national exams broke, a parent looking for an elementary school for his son asked me if my school was ready to implement the new curriculum.

After several seconds, I said that my school would surely follow it. We have tried to learn whatever we could about it and have been following a subject-integrated curriculum for some time. The school has been waiting to receive a complete version of the new curriculum.

The new academic year is drawing near. No comprehensive documents detailing the new curriculum have been released.

As a private school, we have had difficulties in answering those kind of questions from parents. We realize that parents have often been bewildered by corruption in our national education system. Their emotional burden regarding the future of their children very frequently leads them to unnecessary hesitation. They easily forget that school is just a part of a child’s entire education. Many of the parents make choices based on incorrect referrals.

In implementing programs, whether a new curriculum or new government policy, private schools are always in second place behind state schools.

An instance of this unfair treatment can be seen in the requirement that private schools to follow the lead of state schools, although the state schools might be poorer in quality. Here, poor quality should not be misunderstood as a dearth in operational funds. State schools receive more than enough cash from the government and they also raise funds from parents.

Private schools, especially new ones, those with a small number of students or with those with limited financial capability, are in a difficult position.

While most policies are administrative or procedural in nature, schools must implement them at an expense of funds, energy or time. This happens for the national exams, changes to the curriculum, new school accreditation processes and also for policies made by subdistrict or district state educational agencies.

In the district where I manage a school, for example, we have to spare certain amount of money every month to anticipate such policies. Recently, for example, related to a program called National Standard School Exams (USBN) for sixth graders, we had to pay, without protest, Rp 260,000 (US$26.80) per student.

What we have received in return has been poor quality exam papers prepared by local educational agencies as well as infuriating service provided by the school used by our students to take exams.

Back to the parent’s initial question in the opening of this article, as a private school, we tend to develop our own way to survive and in many cases to perform better, not only than private schools, but fully state-supported schools, too.

So, in responding to the above question, we must be able to ensure parents that we have distinct values. We often have to make them realize that changes in the national curriculum never amount to much and that the changes are more in administrative.

We actually do not want to misunderstand any alternatives proposed by the Education and Culture Ministry. But it has been often that change has been introduced to whitewash a problem and not to cope with it.

The plan to omit English from the curriculum of primary schools is a clear instance of the whitewash policy. The inability to assure fun, creative and effective learning processes at schools has camouflaged with an injudicious move: removing difficult topics from the curriculum.

By the same token, the ministry is disorganized. Questionable policies have been introduced to show that the ministry exists and does something. In fact, besides its 2.6 trillion rupiah cost, the plan to unnecessarily change the curriculum just makes things worse in the eyes of the public.

However, as citizens, we might learn something from what Socrates did thousands of years ago. Because of his dissenting opinion, he was forced to commit suicide, despite the public belief that he was right and the state was wrong. We in the end have to respect the existence of the state while at the same time hoping that all of the fraud and incompetence springs from ignorance, not heartlessness.

Khairil Azhar  ;   

A School Manager and A Researcher at Paramadina Foundation Jakarta

JAKARTA POST, 04 Mei 2013

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Assessing university autonomy

Law No. 9/2009 on Education Legal Entity reinstates the autonomy of seven state universities (less than one in 10 nationally) which had earlier been awarded the status of state-owned legal entities. 

This status, which is different from the purely government administered status of other state universities, provided for the legal authority to act autonomously in terms of both academic and non-academic matters. 

Under the new law, this autonomy is seen as a road to progress through the encouragement it provides for these universities to expand their study programs, to create a better “academic” atmosphere for conducting research and to establish international collaboration in research and publication. 

Student activities will also benefit both in academia and in developing social awareness and responsibility and, in addition, autonomy will also pave the way for improving governance practices including greater transparency, accountability and efficiency. 

But all these potential advantages designed to help give Indonesian higher education a firmer footing on the world stage are currently in jeopardy as the underlying law is being challenged.

The first attack on higher education autonomy came when a group of people representing private educational institutions requested a judicial review of the education legal entity law that, beyond the aforementioned seven state universities, required most educational institutions to be legal entities — from playgroups to universities and including all private as well as some public institutions. 

The reason for the challenge was that private schools are currently owned and managed by foundations and some, including many religiously affiliated foundations, operate numerous schools at all levels and even across the country. 

The judicial review was approved by the Constitutional Court in March 2010, which declared the whole law unconstitutional, even though the judicial review request was limited to the legal-entity requirement. 

In fact, some of these private institutions have had a long history, having been established at a time when laws underlying the establishment of educational institutions were very different. A person or a group of people could start an educational institution simply by making the necessary investments. 

Over time these laws required these organizations to become foundations and to be recognized legal entities. But the 2009 law muddied these waters by creating a rift between the owners/foundations and the administration of these educational institutions. 

This can be exemplified by the private Trisakti University in Jakarta where the assets are being fought over by the foundation and administration.

However, it is this same law which extended autonomy to the seven state universities. And thus, when the Constitutional Court declared the law unconstitutional, these same universities also lost the legal basis for their existence. 

This was the first setback to autonomy and effectively created a vacuum for the autonomous universities, which now had no legal status. As a result the government had to take swift action, leading to Law No. 12/2012, known as the Higher Education Institutions Law (UU PT) according to which the seven state universities could select one of three financial statuses — autonomous, as a work unit of the Ministry of Education, or as a public-service state institution similar, for example, to public hospitals.

The second attack came when a group of students from Andalas University in Padang, West Sumatra, submitted a motion for judicial review of the higher education law in October 2012. 

They opposed the option of autonomy because they believed that this would lead to a “corporate mentality” with rising tuition fees and reduced opportunities for poorer students to gain access to these institutions. 

Unfortunately this also overlooked the fact that increased tuition fees have been a fact of life at all public universities and that some collect higher fees than those charged by the seven universities opting for autonomy.

Moreover, what the students refuse to acknowledge is that autonomous universities may actually be in a better position to assist the poor through cross-subsidization. 

They claim that the amount parents are willing to pay is the only determining factor for admission, but fail to provide proof. 

And while it is true that state universities have raised tuition fees and demand relatively higher fees from better-off students, the additional funds can also be used to cross-subsidize well-earned admissions among the less fortunate. 

The attacks have come in waves — even before the Constitutional Court has made a decision on whether to grant the petition of these applicants to declare a number of paragraphs unconstitutional, already another group of students has filed for a judicial review of the same law.

Anxiously awaiting the outcome, the proponents of autonomy are still waiting for the Constitutional Court to make their decision and the question remains: are the seven currently autonomous universities to lose this status?

Mayling Oey-Gardiner  ;   

A Professor at the University of Indonesia,

Member of the Indonesian Academy of Sciences

JAKARTA POST, 04 Mei 2013

  

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Exam and the death of the sound mind

   In front of their friends and parents, the education specialist called the students one-by-one. Every student got a five or 10 minute healing procession. Acting like a hypnotist, or more precisely, like a traditional shaman, he began by asking each of them to repeat what he recited, which comprised Islamic sacred words arranged in a random order.

 After making sure of each student’s mesmerization, he started to investigate (or make the students confess), asking questions about the mistakes they committed — mainly related to the preparations for the upcoming national exams — and making them pledge not to repeat the mistakes again and to better themselves in the future.

 In a normal situation, when there is no pressure such as the obligation to pass the National Exams, I would not be sure that the students would willingly follow the above practice.

  First, public interrogation in front of friends, parents and other spectators is actually an embarrassment. This would be even more keenly felt by teenagers, who often feel awkward among their friends or other people.

 Second, while some or many of them seemed to accept the practice, we should be aware of behavioral deviation phenomena, such as masochism or a feeling of excitement when a person is physically or psychologically abused.

 At the same time, recalling the fact that our children are mentally socially constructed to a certain extent, we must be more critical with the emerging “religious” practice at almost all schools called muhasabah, or retreat, which is intended to make them better prepared before the National Exams.

 Listening to their answers of why they went on retreat, many of the students have said that they would be able to answer exam questions more easily because they were the hands of God.

 Many think that it can be an instant way out of their laziness problem or learning disorders.

 In fact, we know, positive knowledge of science, math, or languages can only be acquired through learning, reasoning and experiencing. The knowledge is not implanted because of the mercy of God because of their piety.

 Many of the students, as well as their teachers, think that a long and often painful process of learning is not necessary; that relentless effort will eventually surrender to the iron fist of fortune. Or else, they are made believe that the process is less necessary than the end result. Consequently, dishonesty materializes in form of shortcuts such as cheating or teachers helping their students to pass the exams illegally.

 To this point, while the concept of the National Exams is not wrong, the practices that have evolved before and after their implementation are.

 On one hand, the process is intended to ensure a quality education for all Indonesian children. Yet on the other hand, the process lends itself to the assassination of logical and reasoning ability in students.

 Back to the story of the education shaman. We have to mention that the National Exams are a blessing for him. He can enjoy more money than what is received by an ordinary teacher in a month.

 He need only memorized a few sacred words, possess a rhetoric ability and build connections with school principals.

 The shaman would never think that the parents have to pay more than their ordinary tuition fees because of the preparations for the National Exams — a fund-raising practice that has been prohibited.

 It is simply because they think like real businessmen without sufficient empathy for the suffering of the others.

 Talking to some teachers, I promised that I would never let my children experience the practice. I believe that once sound minds are interfered with by illogical or unreasonable activities, they might lose their passion to learn and experience normally.

 Similarly, their consciences will be trimmed down gradually once they are accustomed to enjoying instant or effortless success.

 Students who have been forced to do unreasonable things by the people who fear their own failures should have a forgiving heart. Forget the embarrassing public confession and do not let it linger your memory. Just believe in yourself and never compromise your integrity.

Khairil Azhar  ;  

A School Manager and A Researcher at the Paramadina Foundation

JAKARTA POST, 13 April 2013

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The exam’s new system: One step forward, two steps back

 This year, more than three million senior high schools students and vocational schools are expected to participate in the annually-held national exam — popularly known as the National Examinations (UN) — that is slated to kick off on April 15.

 Slightly different from the previous year, this year’s UN will be held under a new system. The question sheets have been designed in the form of 20 dissimilar packages, with each containing completely different versions of questions.

 Each student then takes the same exam with a different version of questions. Through this new system, students are expected to focus on answering their own questions and more importantly cheating and other possible fraud committed during the exams can be prevented.

 Unlike last year’s system, the new system is indeed one step forward because it is more likely to curb cheating, although no one can be sure that cheating will not recur.

 It should be apparent here that what is new in this year’s UN system concerns technicalities, that it is an anticipation of possible students’ cheating, which caused an uproar last year.

 Thus, this is a solution to the technical, if not trivial, problem, but does not address more substantial problems of the final exam often voiced by educational practitioners.

 What both the past and current systems have always ignored is the extent to which the national exam, as a large-scale standardized test, yields positive pedagogical effects on students and teachers and the extent to which it is accountable in the eyes of the public at large.

 Pedagogically, a test intended to measure students’ learning achievements must yield to beneficial effects on learning (technically called washback effects). This suggests that a test such as the exam must arouse and motivate students’ further learning to their own advantage.

 It should allow students to monitor their own learning strategies, provide corrective feedback to these strategies, and aid retention and transfer of what has been learnt. In essence, the exam must allow students to conduct self-assessment.

 Furthermore, the accountability factor should not be deliberately dismissed from the exam. This is especially true, given that this state-sponsored exam belongs in the category of a high-stake exam, the obtained scores of which have been used to make crucial pedagogical decisions.

 Test accountability also entails fairness and the inclusion of a code of ethics, which includes, among other things, respect for humanity, prevention of the misuse of knowledge and skills, commitment to the integrity of the community and the mindfulness of obligations to society (Crusan, 2010). Thus, the results of the test have far-reaching implications, not limited to educational context only.

  We have witnessed that whatever pedagogical paradigms (manifested in the curriculum) we have been adhering to in the national education system, the state-mandated UN always withstands the test of time.

 Despite the strong, repeated resistance against it, it is highly likely to be used as the sole standardized test under the much-debated 2013 curriculum in years to come.

 Assuming that it will be used, the fiercest criticism the final exam will face is related to how the unobservable qualities (constructs) highlighted in the basic competence in the new curriculum can be tested using a single instrument measurement (i.e. the UN).

 Again, it seems that the feasibility or practicality of the national exam over its validity and reliability will still be the prime consideration for its continued use in the future.

 A quality test (or assessment), however, should not always be in the form of a standardized large-scale test like that of the exam. Assessment experts and researchers concur that this kind of test often does more harm than good.

 They propose instead a more situated, context-specific, and locally designed test. Contrary to a larger-scale test that is detached and often has no clear pedagogical benefits, locally developed tests are more test-taker-friendly as their design or construction often envisions the real contextual factors such as the instructional learning goals, teaching materials used and the cultural and social milieu of the institution where the students learn. This will surely help attain the intended, positive washback effects.

  What is more, the accessibility to obtain information such as the contents of materials to be covered in the test, the format of the test, and the scoring criteria used are made easier and relatively transparent to test-takers and other stakeholders, hence its public accountability.

 All of these features are clearly missing in a widely-used standardized large-scale test like the national exam.

Setiono Sugiharto  ;   

An Associate Professor at Atma Jaya Catholic University,

Chief-Editor of the Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching

JAKARTA POST, 13 April 2013

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Questioning autonomy in higher education

   The recent debate on a judicial review filed with the Constitutional Court against Law No. 12/ 2012 on higher education has spawned concerns among the country’s intellectuals over the autonomy of higher education. The law has been contested by six students from Andalas University who said that their access to university had been impeded.

 If the Constitutional Court annuls this law, it is feared that the autonomy of higher education in Indonesia will be at stake.

 The concern over the autonomy of higher education is reminiscent of the previous revocation of Law on legal educational institutions (BHP), which at that time similarly sparked heated debate among academics and education pundits.

 While the notion of autonomy in higher education has become a popular catchphrase, it is has never been perceived with uniformity. There is no such consensus, even among intellectuals, as to what constitutes autonomy in higher education.

 The notion of autonomy, unless implemented with precision, can be subject to semantic manipulations that are at the whims of the power holders of educational institutions. If related to an institutional and bureaucratic context, it is clearly not a neutral word. It is a word loaded with ulterior meanings.

 Construed from the perspective of the technocratic logic of an educational institution, autonomy signifies the idea of full control in managing universities and in designing policies related to educational activities.

 Autonomy in this sense tries to disconnect the management of an institution from state intervention.

 Yet, autonomous educational institutions are not free from flaws. The policies they impose may not benefit stakeholders (especially students) and are not amendable to their interest and needs, as these policies are the by-products of ideological and institutional logic to which educational staff, students, and teachers must accede.

 It is no surprise that clashes — which often end in violence — between university rectors and students occurred in many, if not most, universities.

 Autonomy, however, can be understood from the perspective of a pure academic logic, which emphasizes the spirit of lehrfreiheit (freedom to teach) and lernfreiheit (freedom to learn) — the well-known slogan long preserved by the University of Berlin. Educational institutions should be autonomous under this perspective, in that academic freedom is nurtured and the habits of mind such as inquisitiveness, persistence, creativity, responsibility, and imagination are highly respected.

 In contrast to the former notion of autonomy, which has the tendency of favoring the rigidity of technocratic reasoning and ideology, the latter notion allows fluidity and flexibility, and is not predetermined and imposed upon those who are undertaking educational activities.

 It seems that the imminent annulment of the higher education law may considerably dilute the autonomy (in the former sense) of higher education, as has been enthusiastically voiced by the country’s intellectuals.

 The concern here is plausible because without the law, autonomy with the technocratic logic doesn’t hold sway and has no mutability in the presence of conflict and disruption.

 It is resistant to changes and by hook or crook tries to conserve constancy for the sake of maintaining the vested interests and the constellation of structural power of elites in educational institution.

 But autonomy from the perspective of the academic logic is fluid, not seeing things as always remaining constant in different circumstances. With or without the law, it may not be distorted and can surely withstand efforts which will disrupt it. Because it valorizes the habits of mind, any disruption will be appropriated rather than summarily rejected.

 Thus, given the vacuous notion of autonomy, the bogey of losing autonomy of higher education should by no means cause us to succumb to unnecessary and counterproductive politics of education and to lose sight of the long-standing academic beacon of lehrfreiheit and lernfreiheit, which have been instilled into those undertaking educational activities in most universities in the US and European countries.

 On the face of it, it would be much more productive if we intellectuals were concerned instead over how the tradition of nurturing the habits of mind among our students can be sustained rather than be overwhelmed by the apprehension of the judicial review of higher education law.

Setiono Sugiharto ; 

An Associate Professor at Atma Jaya Catholic University,

Chief Editor of the Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching

JAKARTA POST, 30 Maret 2013

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