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Globalising the “Indonesian man” or how multilateral organisations intervene in the formation of identities through educational reform

Chapter 9, in Tor Halvorsen, Gigliola Mathisen and Tom Skauge (eds) Identity Formation or Knowledge Shopping. Education and research in the new globality.SIU Report Series, pp. 213-247, No. 3, 2005. ISBN 1503-2876

By Lars E. Gjelstad, Dept. of social anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway.

A distinct feature of the 20th century was the global spread of secular educational

institutions that orient the young generation toward practices, knowledge and values that in

many local communities undermine the authority and influence of the elders and of local

cultural traditions. The new institutions also serve to internalise the skills, values and

identities of the modern nation-state (Levinson and Holland 1996). In the territories we

now call ‘the third world’, these institutions were first established by European colonial

agencies, and later transformed to national educational systems due to the felt inadequacies

of colonial education to local needs. Integral to these transformations was a parallel

redefinition of education and knowledge through the prism of national development. Today

we witness a wave of educational reforms throughout the world designed to prepare a new

generation for a social reality that is now often recognized discursively as the “knowledge

society.” These reforms, through further displacing alternative paths to knowledge, are

obviously part of broader civilising processes where novel forms of sovereignty and

subjectivity are being constituted, including new understandings of national character.

Taking Indonesia as a special case, this chapter discusses the role of education in

broader processes of nation building in a time of globalisation. According to the Indonesian

constitution a main task of schooling is to create a ‘New Indonesian Man’ (Hooker and

Dick 1993:4), and we will explore the ideas of learning and personhood lying behind this

concept, and then investigate how this discursive formation changes over time with shifting

social and political contexts. Analytically, this will be accomplished through investigating

the forms of knowledge, practices and sensibilities that count as cultural capital in these

specific definitions of the ‘New Indonesian Man.’ Such definitions are here understood to

articulate and constitute distinct ideals for what it means to be an “educated person” (cf.

Levinson and Holland 1996). This framework will further be applied to investigate the

forms of cultural capital that, in contemporary discourse on educational reform in

Indonesia, set up dominant definitions of young, modern and knowledgeable Indonesians.

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In order to throw these representations of the "educated person" into relief the first

section of this chapter will present the kind of challenges that the newly independent

Indonesian republic faced regarding the task of building up an appropriate system for

educating the future generations of Indonesian citizens. After having described the

educational visions of the first national movements that inspired the educational system

under Sukarno, the first president, I go on to discuss some of the reconceptualisations of

education and development that occurred during the rule of Suharto’s New Order regime

(1965-1997). Then I will point out some of the regime’s structural weaknesses that

ultimately lead to the fall of Suharto after large reformation campaigns where students

played a decisive role.

With these historical contexts in mind, we turn to investigate the comprehensive

educational reforms currently taking place in Indonesia where governments, NGO’s and

intellectuals debate how to train a new generation of citizens for the new millennium.

These comprehensive reforms are inextricably tied to what the Indonesian government read

as inherent requirements of a new global economic order. When the “Asian Crisis” hit

Indonesia in 1997, these structural requirements could no longer be ignored. Critical

diagnoses of what caused the severe crisis are therefore part of the overall discourse on

societal reforms. There is a general understanding that grave weaknesses in the education

system are an important part of the crisis, and many look to a better national education as

its cure.

The reform is very much influenced by a global discourse on education, which

gained momentum with the “Education-For-All” movement. With this movement, initiated

at a huge meeting in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990, the efforts of major donors, civil

organizations and governments were coordinated into a more coherent approach to ensure

full enrolment in primary education. From the end of the 1990's there has however been an

increased focus on the importance of higher education for development, a shift that

culminated with the document "Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and

Promise" (World Bank 2000).

During the course of the chapter I will demonstrate that the multilateral

organisations play a decisive role in shaping the new policy, and I will argue that their

ideological impact lies in the introduction of new concepts of learning and new

understandings of the nature of knowledge-production. The ontological metaphors implicit

in these new models cannot be separated from the steady expansion of a capitalist mode of

production, including a recent belief in knowledge as the real engine of sustained growth. It

must be a main task of the ‘Education for All’-movement to make visible how, and to what

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degree, a particular political economy restricts or enables the transmission of particular

social ideas, values and identities at schools and universities. This influence is often

conveyed at a meta-communicative level, constituting what is often termed a “hidden

curriculum”.

An important part of the ongoing reforms, and perhaps the most difficult one, is a

thorough decentralisation of the educational system in line with a decentralisation of the

Indonesian state. I argue at the end of this chapter that this situation has made it more

urgent to design research projects that can inform policies regarding how to make better

links between local systems of education and local systems of culture and production.

Universities at the provincial levels might play an active role in supporting local paths of

development as well as to provide teachers for local primary and secondary schools.

The introduction of formal education to Indonesia

The Islamic boarding schools, called pesantren, are in many ways the archetypical

traditional educational institution in Indonesia. Their history can be traced back to the

Hindu-Buddhist ashrams where students searched enlightenment from a guru. The

conversion to Islam from the 16th century onward did not radically change the form and

function of these schools as mystical experiences were still crucial to the guidance of a

kyai, a Muslim wise man. Until early 20th century, pesantren were the only alternative for

Indonesians due to the small number of colonial 'native schools' (Jones 1991:19-20).

The Dutch introduced formal education - with secular subjects, fixed grades and

western teaching methods - to Indonesia as part of the colonial system and used it as a tool

to cultivate and domesticate the “native” mind and to recruit personnel to bureaucratic

positions. From the 1950's, after the Indonesian independence, the schools spread

throughout the archipelago, leading to an increased democratisation of literacy. They also

began to implement a broader educational model that stressed the development of character

as well as of the intellect. Changing behaviour and moulding responsible members of

society were central goals, and these goals have since then been part of all educational

regulations (Kartodirdjo 1988:118, Dixon 1992:1-2).

The actual building of these “new” Indonesian men required a huge infrastructure in

terms of physical buildings, parental motivation, and teacher training. Some numbers from

Statistik Indonesia 1996 reveal the significance and scale of modern schooling. Throughout

the archipelago there are today about 150.000 primary schools, 20.000 junior high schools

and 12.000 senior high schools, with a sum total of 35 million students. The private sector

finances and organises a large part of these institutions, but all of them are required to have

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Pancasila1 as their sole ideological basis, and they are all placed under the Ministry of

National Education which standardises curricula and teaching methods. In this way young

people from all over the archipelago are integrated into a relatively homogeneous

educational and cultural system, thus transforming local societies and traditions.

The formation of the Taman Siswa Education movement

The nationalist movements that transformed the political landscape of Indonesia during the

three first decades of the twentieth century saw education of the young generation as a

main task. From the first Indonesian nationalist organisation, the Budi Utomo, sprung two

organisations that devoted themselves to educational matters, namely Taman Siswa and

Muhammadiyah, and both struggled to combat old-fashioned ways of life (McVey

1967:132). While the first one was very much concerned with preserving an indigenous

personal character, Muhammadiyah was by its very foundation directed toward getting

religion rid of traditional elements that were seen as an obstacle to the original teaching of

the prophet as well as to the development of modern science and trade (ibid.). This

reformist teaching was in turn opposed by more traditional Muslims lead by an elite of

rural religious teachers (kyai), who had the boarding schools (pesantren) as their main

source of authority. This rather traditionalist religious stream was organised into Nahdlatul

Ulama in 1926, and they still conceive Muhammadiyah as a secularising force. Also today,

these three traditions represent distinct ways of appropriating and indigenising the modern

through education.

Ki Hadjar Dewantara, who is now regarded as the architect of national education, is

well known for his visionary leadership of Taman Siswa, which blossomed in the 1920's

(McVey 1967). Its methods were anchored in a so-called “family principle” where the

students should address their teachers as mother and father, and which ignored any

distinctions of feudal Javanese as well as Colonial hierarchies (Shiraishi 1997). The

classroom with its lack of a complex social hierarchy was in this way seen as an ideal

representation of the national egalitarian community. Hence, they invented a generic

concept of the ‘family’ detached from any particular socio-cultural system (ibid.).

Considering the great variety of kinship patterns within Indonesia's 300 ethnic groups, this

represents a fantastic example of a synthesis of modern and traditional concepts of

socialisation and authority. 1 Pancasila is a term of Sanskrit origin designating the five principles that comprise Indonesia’s state philosophy, namely belief in one supreme god, humanism, nationalism, popular sovereignty and social justice. It was proclaimed by Sukarno in 1945 and incorporated into the constitution in 1978 by Suharto. In 1985 all political parties and organisations became obliged under law to adopt Pancasila as their sole ideological basis.

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Some clues to the formations of the Taman Siswa philosophy might be found in

Dewantara’s own life history. He grew up in a Javanese royal house, lived in the

Netherlands in the years 1913-17, and obtained a teaching certificate there. While in the

Netherlands he attended the “First Colonial Education Congress”, and his engagement with

the new European educational movements made him familiar with existing criticisms of

educational methods which he could use to make sense of his felt discontent with colonial

schools in Indonesia (McVey 1967:130, 133). What he wanted to develop was a system

that was both progressive in Western terms and characteristically “Indonesian” (ibid.).

Traces of his Javanese origin and his orientation toward spiritual self-development are

visible in his philosophy of teaching which consists of three basic elements, namely the

value of “self-expression, the adjustment of teaching to the terms of the child’s world, and

the techniques of indirect guidance and control” (ibid.:133). Taman Siswa was, unlike

Muhammadiyah, surrounded by a ‘folk’ ethos - a whole way of life, without a fixed

doctrine - and its teaching could therefore not simply be added to the secular colonial

curriculum. It was indeed a radical pedagogy.

The first president of Indonesia, Sukarno, was an important mediator of a kind of

indigenous socialism. He was attracted by the way Taman Siswa mixed Hindu, Buddhist,

Islamic and Western ideas and saw it as a possible model for the whole nation (Ricklefs

1991:182). Later, in 1957, being inspired by Dewantara’s philosophy and model of

leadership, Sukarno introduced ‘Guided Democracy.’ It was based upon a ‘mutual

cooperation’ cabinet, and was seen as “a form of government more suited to the national

character” (Ricklefs 1991:251).2

To sum up, the personality the Taman Siswa wished to see embodied in the ‘New

Indonesian Man’ was contrary to the ‘servitude’ that characterised the ethos of the courts as

well as the colonial state. It tried to develop an educational system that was well suited to

the economic and political situation of that time as well as to the people’s culturally

anchored life worlds. Besides, the people should be free to develop their own personality at

the same time as they contributed to national development.

Although the novel and noble ideas of the Taman Siswa movement colour the

educational system up to the present time, they were early bleached not only by all kinds of

2 A similar case of domesticating modern schooling is Nyere’s, the first Tanzanian president, educational policy, called ”Education for Self-Reliance.” The goal of that reform was to design an education system that was more in accordance with the needs of this newly created nation. ”Ujamaa is a Kiswahili term meaning ”togetherness” and denoting the type of socialism Nyere wanted to promote, a socialism built on African roots” (Brock-Utne 2000:124). While Sukarno already in 1965 had to give way to the capitalist-oriented leadership of New Order, the Tanzanian government replaced it’s socialist policy in the 1980s - partly due to World Bank and IMF pressure (Brock-Utne 2000:125).

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mundane routines and requirements of schooling - many of them inherited from the

colonial system - but also by a wider political economy, demanding global competitiveness

and which also put forward new concepts of knowledge and development. It is important

that we do not forget Dewantara’s and other well-educated nationalists’ effort to create an

educational system more oriented to the basic needs of human beings situated at the

margins of cosmopolitan centres. One lesson to be drawn from this, I will argue, is the

importance of strong academic communities committed to the task of building sustainable

and nationally anchored educational systems. Implicated in that lesson is an awareness of

how education is embedded in the politics of culture and identity.

Note another radical shift that came with the ideology of nationalism. Since national

independence requires a mobilisation of the masses, the village now came to replace the

court as the main cultural centre (McVey 1967:138). The elite's attitude toward the village

was, however, a double one:

One the one hand, nationalist sentiment viewed the village as the reservoir of Indonesian culture; on the other hand, the transformation of the villager was seen as a major goal of modern nationhood. The common man was still ignorant (masih bodoh); he must be made literate and educated in his duties as a citizen (ibid:138).

Such was the ideological background for the nationalists’ attitudes toward the education of

the commons, an attitude that, as we will see, in many ways still prevails.

Assessing New Order’s model of education and development

During three decades of development policy under Suharto’s New Order regime (1965-

1998) much effort was directed toward developing a modern educational system - and its

relative success must be seen as both cause and effect of the economic growth under the

New Order leadership.

Indonesia is often admired for its rapid expansion of primary education which

actually started with the high oil revenues in the mid 1970s. Primary enrolment rose from

13 million in 1973/74 to 26 million in 1986/87, and Indonesia has from that time had a near

100% enrolment rate. Junior secondary enrolment increased from 1,5 million in 1973/74 to

6,1 million in 1986/87 and 9,4 million in 2001. The gross enrolment rate of secondary

education is 56% (World Bank 2003). The Indonesian New Order government however

failed to follow up these results by not building up an adequate higher education sector and

by neglecting the quality of basic education (Sjöholm 2002:15). The New Order

government spends about 8% of its public expenditures on education, which is rather low

compared to neighbouring countries such as Malaysia (15%), Thailand (20%) and

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Singapore (23%) (Sjöholm 2002:15). This results in very low wages for teachers, large

classes, deteriorating school buildings, and low access to textbooks of a rather poor quality3

(ibid.:24).

For tertiary education, the enrolment rate in Indonesia is 11 % for higher education,

while the equivalent number for Malaysia is 12, Thailand 22, the Philippines 29, and

Singapore 38. The 44 state universities, 24 state polytechnics, and 5 state fine art academics

in Indonesia have not been able to meet the public demand for higher education, and

partially as a result of this shortage, more than thousand private institutions have been set

up. They are however poorly monitored, so their quality is generally low (Sjöholm

2002:16). Private universities provide mainly social science courses where the costs are

low, and only 10% of the students in private institutions are in science-related fields (World

Bank 1998:92).4

The rapid economic growth in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries was

commonly described as a "miracle" until the economy more or less collapsed in 1997. The

growth had been based mainly on exports of labour-intensive and low-skilled products.

This sector faced increasing competition when China, India and others liberalised their

economies. In addition to being less competitive in provision of bargain-priced labour for

basic manufacturing, the skill training programs was not keeping pace with the global

technological advancements, which made it difficult to compete within the more

technology-based industries. This structural problem was visible to the governments in

Indonesia and the other countries in the region before the crisis, but there was not enough

political will or pressure on governments to undertake important reforms as long as the

economy expanded and the overall standard of living improved.

Before going into the contemporary reformation of the education sector in

Indonesia, I will give an outline of the political culture that dominated Indonesian

education systems during New Order, and which has many similarities to the situation in

the other Southeast Asian countries.

New Order’s legitimacy rested heavily upon its role in securing economic

development and political stability, and it encouraged Indonesians to appropriate

technological and economic devices from Western countries while trying to protect and

3 In 1989, the New Order government launched a policy for achieving nine years of basic education for all by 2010. Implementation of the policy began in 1994, and means that enrolments need to double over the period (World Bank 1998:46). The allocation of public funds to realize this ambitious plan may to some extent explain the low quality of primary education (World Bank 2003). The crisis has of course dramatically worsened the financial situation.4 Singapore on the other hand has a large proportion of their students in the sciences and engineering faculties, which has been a conscious strategy for encouraging economic development. Thailand has most of their students in law and social sciences (Sjoholm 2002:11). In other words, there are significant differences in the structure of higher education in Southeast Asia.

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develop their “authentic Indonesian character” as it was formulated in the national

Pancasila ideology. Suharto’s development project builds heavily on the premise that it is

possible and necessary to distinguish between economic/ technological and cultural/ moral

aspects of social life. The Indonesian notion of development itself, pembangunan, does also

mean “awakening” and implies the realisation of a rich and authentic Indonesian culture

that flourished in the pre-colonial era. This discourse enabled Suharto to legitimise his

orientation toward a global capitalistic political economy at the same time as he insisted on

the need to protect the citizens and their national character from the destructive and

individualist cultures of the ‘West’. Under New Order the “family principle” developed by

the Taman Siswa movement became more strongly connected to Suharto’s definitions of

Pancasila which tend to build upon a kind of neo-traditional notion of authority, and which

also informed their definition of the “New Indonesian Man” as well as the cultural form

that New Order’s development path took.

This ideology is in line with the notion, most explicitly articulated by Lee Kuan

Yew in Singapore and Mahatir in Malaysia, that national cultures “transcend the processes

of social and economic change” (Robison and Goodman 1996:3). According to their view,

a secular liberalist culture is not an necessary or inherent part of industrial capitalist

societies, but rather a particular Western cultural phenomena (ibid.:3). This distinction

between cultural and technological aspects of development, and the effort to define a fixed

and proper relationship between them, is somewhat naïve in its replication of a Cartesian

dualism between persons and objects. The evolution of Indonesian youth culture, with

techno-music as one of its current fads, is but one example of how technology has cultural

implications that is not easily bracketed out. New “technologies of the intellect” (Goody

1977) and of the body create new ways of being-in-the-world, and structures perhaps even

the very constitution of the human brain (Cf. Haraway 1985). Technological innovation is

therefore dialectically related to the cultural forms that support and develop around them.

The concepts of human productivity, of learning and being, lying behind New

Order's model of development failed to grasp the complexities and contradictions of human

sociality. The rigid plans to build a “New Indonesian Man” was perhaps once a noble idea,

but the machinery of New Order governmentality created a generation of frustrated,

consumption-oriented, and politically unconcerned Indonesians (Siegel 1986, Mulder

1996). This is another example of how educators and government policy planners tend to

apply a model that “does not reflect the political and economic reality of the new nations or

accurately describe the way education actually works in society” (Bock 1982:86). In other

words, they do not understand the complex ‘ecological webs’, i.e., the non-linear

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constitution of the social fields which they struggle to manage. I will therefore claim that

the New Order government did not fully understand the inherent cultural dynamics

implicated in the technologisation of various social fields.

My own ethnographic research among high school students in Solo, a centre of

Javanese civilisation, also reveals that New Order youths in their peer groups further

continued discourses on modernity and development that were very much initiated in the

classroom. As such, they may be seen as processes of cultural “bricolage” (Levi-Strauss

1966) as they serve to reorganise and recontextualise elements taught in schools in ways

that are more adapted to their everyday life. Their metaphorisation of modernity and

development is interesting because it took as its point of departure what I see as

discrepancies between values explicitly or discursively taught in schools and the kind of

knowledge and forms of capital (Bourdieu 1977) that factually brought success in New

Order Indonesia (Gjelstad 2000). Their playful investigations of these internal

contradictions and their extensive reappropriations of development models imply a

resistance to, and an active broadening of the concepts of learning and being found in

formal education. My hypothesis is that the fall of New Order’s political legitimacy is

related to the global flow of consumer-oriented lifestyles which made teenagers less

receptive to the top-down social engineering projects of the government, like building the

“New Indonesian Man.” It is these new forms of subjectivities that the new educational

paradigms have to accommodate. And it is within such an unstable terrain that the

multilateral organisations now move in with specific solutions to the problems they of

course also help to define.

The political economy of morality and knowledge-production

A salient feature of the dominant New Order ideology was its downplaying of any class

distinctions as it portrayed Indonesia as a fundamentally classless and egalitarian society

based on ”family principles.” Within a New Order political discourse on an authentic

‘Pancasila society’, family-ism served increasingly to disguise the unequal distribution of

material resources. Potential conflicting social models are in a way “culturalised” and

hence pushed out of political agendas, thus muting alternative and potentially critical social

orientations. There is no sense of potential contradictions here between, on the one hand,

the policy of opening up the whole society to a capitalist mode of production spearheaded

by a tiny elite, and the effort of building national equality on the other hand.5

5 This blindness is somewhat resonant with a neo-liberal discourse of “globalisation” claiming that open boundaries and free flow is the best way to achieve prosperity and happiness for each and everyone. It is “equality of opportunity” which is seen as the ultimate value, also within the field of education.

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Looking at the problem of linking family-ism and the modern state, the following

worries by the Dutch anthropologist Niels Mulder are highly relevant;

The problem with the civics course is that it consistently uses this model of the ideal family, or community, and its inherent ethics as a paradigm to understand wider society. This results in logical and sociological nonsense. In wider society, relationships are general, abstract, anonymous and thus businesslike. Wider society is, therefore, not so much in need of personalistic ethics as of impersonal law (Mulder 2000:94).

Forcing the model of the family on society, Mulder argues, also promotes an ethical

framing of knowledge where right knowledge more or less by itself leads to right

behaviour;

Ergo, a child needs to be filled with the right knowledge; this needs to be drilled in through repetition, reiteration, memorization, and in this way the person will become wise, that is in position of the right standards that then function as a compass to direct action. Right knowledge = right values that bring about right action” (Mulder 2000:94-95).

According to Mulder, Indonesian pupils do not learn to think critically about their place in

the world, as they are not taught historical and analytical thinking. Even if society is

presented as changing, students are not taught to explore and to adapt flexibly to changing

conditions, but to learn a closed cultural/ideological system, called Pancasila, defined by

the central government, which connects everything from modern economy to ritual life into

a coherent system (Mulder 2000). A psychological and sociological reductionism seems to

dominate the educational field: Unruliness is presented simply as lack of Pancasila

education.6

A pervasive feature of the learning ethos in Indonesian schools is a passive top-

down transmission of knowledge in which a distinctive model of authority is operating.

The definitions of true and relevant knowledge are coming from a central government and

the teacher’ role is as a mediator of that knowledge. Conceptions of authority and of

knowledge are, I argue here, dialectically related: centralist systems of education foster an

objectification of knowledge, which again leads to a reductive understanding of how

learning occurs and how learning is conditioned by various social circumstances. New

Order, in contrast to the philosophy of Dewantara, supported an education system where

the creation of governable subjects was more important than students’ broader self-

development. The aim of education was first of all economic development, and the

implementation of development was to follow an overarching centralist plan. Through

6 Regarding a key issue raised in the introduction to this book, that of knowledge as identity-formation, the Indonesian case clearly demonstrates that creation and transmission of knowledge may be too closely associated with particular projects of nation-building in the sense that it is counterproductive to personal as well as national development.

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these learning practices a readiness for examination, control and passive reproduction of a

given body of knowledge were habituated. These habituated patterns seem not to be very

productive in overcoming the recent economic and political crisis.

The difficulty of changing such an academic culture is conveyed by the chair of the

National Accreditation Board for Higher Education in Indonesia, M. K. Tadjudin.

Commenting on the implementation of a new paradigm of higher education, he makes the

following statement;

Quality assurance and accreditation are new concepts for many in academia in Indonesia. The concept that the professor knows best and should be in control prevailed. For its part, the public is also not much concerned with issues of quality. Most people just want to get a degree and hopefully a good job, preferably in the bureaucracy. This means that market mechanisms for quality control in higher education do not work in Indonesia. People are not looking for the best programs, but rather for programs that will allow them to obtain a degree as fast as possible. When accreditation was introduced in Indonesia, many state universities—especially the older ones—believed they had no need for accreditation as they were already good institutions, maybe the best in the country (http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/News25/text009.htm).

Niels Mulder (2000:65), which I referred to above, implicitly links the fundamental failures

in the Indonesian education system up with the existence of weak academic milieus, and he

claims that the ‘doctorandes’ who write up the textbooks simply reproduce academic

jargon. I fully agree with Mulder's characteristics of the academic conditions inherited from

the New Order. He fails however to link up his findings to a broader field of global

political economy. In my view the responsibility of the current situation needs to be shared

with a whole range of agents. We should therefore further investigate how IMF’s

adjustment programs and WB’s educational programs together to a large degree forced the

government of Indonesia to the kind of educational policies that Mulder criticises.

A lack of strong universities is not unique to Indonesia, but seems to be the

situation in most developing countries (cf. Altbach 1982). This situation might be seen as

resulting from a policy supporting developing countries to reduce the public cost of higher

education and invest more in primary and secondary education as lower level education

yields more in terms of immediate economic return as well as being the most effective way

to reach the poorest segment of the population (West 1998:4, World Bank 1995). The EFA-

movement and global financial agencies like WB and IMF have been criticised for

underestimating the value of higher education to national development and to the creation

of more localised cultural knowledge (Brock-Utne 2000). This WB policy was somewhat

altered with the publishing of the document "Perils and Promise" (World Bank 2000).

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The influence of the 'Education for All'-movement on educational reform in Indonesia

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, there was a huge conference on Education in

Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990. 150 countries and major NGO’s were gathered, and there was

an intense debate over the role of education in society. It lead to a World Declaration on

Education for All, whose main platform was the UN declaration of human rights from

1948, and the goal was that by year 2000 all children should be enrolled in some kind of

primary education.7 At the next major happening of the “EFA”-movement, an international

consultative forum in Amman, Jordan, in 1996, this goal had to be delayed. In 2000 there

was a World Education Forum in Dakar, leading to a common “Framework for Action”. As

part of this every country had to make a country report assessing the country’s main

achievements and shortcomings.

In the next paragraphs I want to present the Indonesian government’s Country

Report and discuss how the Post-Suharto Government of Indonesia positions themselves to

the EFA-goals. The team being responsible for the Indonesian Country Report first points

out that the Jomtien World Conference on Education for All (EFA-1990) has inspired

Indonesia to make the educational sector a top priority and to develop a coordinated

strategy in order to reach these goals.8 The team provides a long list of successful efforts in

the field of educational development. During the New Order regime the expansion of

school buildings was enormous, and the enrolment rate of primary education reached

almost 98%. The team admits that this policy does not automatically fulfil the demands of

basic learning needs mentioned in the World Declaration on Education for All (March,

1990).

The team first refers to the problems caused by the economic crisis that hit

Indonesia in 1997. Future challenges will still be confronted in making compulsory basic

education functioning effectively, they contend, such as to make students survive from the

crises, develop their full capacities, live and work in dignity, make informed decisions, and

to continue learning (http://www2.unesco.org/ wef/countryreports/indonesia/rapport_3.html).

One of the challenges hinted at here, a challenge that requires our full attention, is

the task of taking care of and preserving the human capital that was achieved during New

Order. For instance, a reintroduction of school fees, as some leading financial agencies

supports, could be such a threat.

7 These goals have now been translated into one of UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG).8 Cf. http://www2.unesco.org/wef/countryreports/indonesia/rapport_1.html (last accessed February 28, 2006).

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At a more fundamental level the report concludes that educational growth has not

secured economic growth. “The basic question is,” they argue, “why education as it is now

operated by many developing nations cannot contribute to the development of the nations?”

(ibid.). This question addresses the core of the problem raised in this book, namely how

knowledge produced in one particular context can spread to other parts of the world and

contribute to human and economic growth (cf. chapter one). The team further reflects upon

this issue in relation to the civilizational foundation of human subjectivity;

It appears that in the era of global economy controlled by market fundamentalism, the world has been fully controlled by western civilization that has been cultivated and developed for centuries that eventually become internalised into the personality system of every person in the western hemisphere but these values are still apart from people of the South and the East (http://www2.unesco.org/ wef/countryreports/indonesia/rapport_3.html, my emphasis).

This paragraph points to Bock’s argument that national development planners almost have

treated education as a kind of magical device to produce growth without having a realistic

or proper understanding of the way educational systems works in particular social and

cultural contexts (Bock 1982:39-40).

The team that wrote the Indonesian country report for the World Education Forum

in Dakar, also commented upon the practice of just importing bodies of knowledge that are

embedded in a foreign civilisation;

In this regard the practice of education in most developing countries has been no more than transferring information in a very traditional way in the context of society that is still being controlled by a traditional value system. It is the team’s conviction that unless education is conceived as a socialization process, education will never be able to carry out its mission to implement the four pillars of learning (learning to know, learning to do, learning to be, and learning to live together), and will also be incapable of satisfying the basic learning needs of the people as stated in the World Declaration on Education for All proclaimed in March 1990 from Jomtien, Thailand (http://www2.unesco.org/wef/countryreports/ indonesia/rapport_3.html, my emphasis).

While emphasizing the social and cultural embeddedness of learning, the team does not

expand the idea of the need for a throughout socialisation, neither does it discuss whether

that implies a more rigid adaptation to the Western civilisation or the crafting of

socialization practices more in line with indigenous conceptions of learning and being. This

problem will be further dealt with below, in a section entitled "reform and

implementation.”

14

National reform and global discourses on learning

One central pillar in the ongoing education reform is a comprehensive re-writing of the

whole curriculum in both primary and secondary education. It is build upon the general

understanding that the last curriculum (1994) was too extensive, and too isolated from

students’ daily lives. It is also regarded as too rigid in its relation to local conditions. All in

all, it did not foster creative, critical, and competitive thinking among Indonesian children

and youths.

The new curricula for primary and secondary education, referred to as

competence–based, and seen as representing a new paradigm, is highly influenced by a

global education discourse as articulated in the Education-For-All movement. The

influence is especially visible in its focus on life-skills, and in its broader conception of

learning, namely: learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together, and learning to

be. This represents a shift from a narrow focus on cognitive content to a broader and more

long-term development of human and social resources. The new curricula shall help

students to acquire the competence needed to face the challenges of contemporary living,

such as being independent, intelligent, critical, rational and creative. Apparently, this

represents a radical transformation of the “Indonesian man,” and the multilateral

organisations play a key role in this redefinition of what it means to be an “educated

person” (Levinson and Holland 1996).

A competence-based curriculum is not a new idea for educationalists, and the

Ministry of National Education itself refers in their general guideline to secondary schools

(Departemen Pendidikan Nasional 2002) to Hall and Jones (1976) and others. The question

is why it is gaining intellectual and political force today with the expansion of an

information-based economy. To a large extent I think this is due to external pressure from

the World Bank and others.9

Running through these reformulations of knowledge and learning is a series of

cultural contradictions: on the one hand knowledge is increasingly treated as an exchange

value, that is, the nature of knowledge is framed more like bits of information rather than as

9 Thailand is currently undertaking the most fundamental restructuring of the education system since the British-educated King Rama VI (1910-25) introduced compulsory education to the country (Pennington 1999). The new reform is intended to weaken state dominance of education and give more room for public participation. It will also give every citizen right to 12 years of state-paid education. As with reforms in Indonesia, the new system will be based on a more learner-centered pedagogy laying more stress on creative and analytical ability than on rote learning (Pennington 1999). Also Singapore experiences a lack of innovative ability among youths as a severe hindrance to further growth. This lack must partially be seen as a result of Singapore's limits of freedom regarding media, civil society, trade unions and political activities. It is obvious that when alternative views are oppressed it does not encourage independent thinking and creativity (cf. Sjöholm 2002:19), which is fundamental to the new knowledge-based economy. The Singaporean government is therefore now eager to reform, and in 1998 it adopted a new program for teacher training that is designed to support creative and critical thinking among students (Pennington 1999).

15

(a more or less) shared culture; transaction vs. incorporation. On the other hand a reductive

cognitive view of knowledge is in the process of being replaced by a broader notion of

learning (cf. Unicef’s 4 pillars of learning). These cultural contradictions are partially the

result of opposing interests (Unicef versus Gatt-WTO is one of them). We should also not

forget that implicit in the expansion of a model of knowledge as transactional information

is also an expansion of certain cultural idioms, not least disguised in a new pedagogical

platform. Gellner (1983) argued that nationalism as a common culture was based on the

industrial revolution. Similarly I would argue that the ongoing restructuring of social

infrastructures is only possible with a parallel reworking of culture and of subjectivity.

The teacher is now, according to the Indonesian educational reform, expected to

become more professional and more independent. The professional teacher has a plan, and

he is able to change his students’ ways of thinking and being; he is creative and critical,

and he has strong visions. At a national seminar, a representative of the Ministry of

Education explained, with reference to the old system, that a “teacher should now act like a

facilitator, rather than a destroyer”. As a way out of a narrow focus on passive knowledge

transmission, it emphasises the importance of creating joyful learning contexts. Knowledge

is not conceptualised as closed bodies; classroom activities should rather trigger broader

processes of learning. In the process, more authority is given to the students themselves.

In addition to revisions of curricula, the new paradigm does also include a new

management model. More democratic, bottom-up oriented and transparent learning

contexts are stressed. Every school has to establish committees where parents and other

stakeholders are free to articulate their visions and interests. The management of the school

is thus expected to be more team-oriented. Greater autonomy is now given at the level of

the teacher, the school, and particular districts.

It is mainly the most resourceful schools that are able to take advantage of the new

possibilities. Most of the schools lack the resources to train their teachers in the new

paradigm, and they lack textbooks, adequate library facilities and computer labs. This

means that the education system cannot, for instance, serve to level the gaps that exist

between students’ different skills in dealing with new technology. Rather the education

system currently tends to reinforce these inequalities. Teachers are too underpaid and too

overloaded with work to learn about Internet etc., and many regret that they cannot act as

persons of authority in the field. The national education system is thus in danger of loosing

its status as the main provider of relevant knowledge.

Schools are now further challenged and encouraged to develop a distinct profile of

their own school through specialisation in subjects and in social identities. Some private

16

Islamic schools take full advantage of their religious profile while the best public schools

develop their image as ‘favourite schools’, providing their students with better facilities,

including “accelerating programs” for the most gifted ones. Such constructions of identities

have some positive aspects, as effective learning always requires a sense of direction and

belonging. On the other hand it falls into a broader logic of branding and marketing

ideology that might form a ‘hidden curricula’ whereby the students themselves are

encouraged to develop their own career profiles and identities, and to make their choice of

schools on that background. I will argue that this is an important dynamic of identity

formation.

The urgency of decentralisation is also related to the fact that Indonesia is an

extremely complex society, with a myriad of ecological, economic, political, and cultural

histories. In such a diverse country, a centralist policy that applies to all localities,

including educational institutions, is in many ways disadvantageous. This situation has

been given more emphasis with the more general agenda of reform, namely local

autonomy. The authority is distributed to about 300 districts (kabupaten), rather than the 27

provinces, perhaps an expression of the central government’s fear of making the provincial

governments too strong.

There is no doubt that the districts lack training in creating effective education

policies, which is only one aspect of the comprehensive marginalisation of the districts that

occurred during Suharto’s rule. Prior to the reform, the districts were mostly used to

receive decrees from Jakarta and return quantitative reports. In a project, from 1996,

proposed to enhance the management capability of the provinces, the World Bank claims

that the provincial management is extremely bureaucratic toward the centre but diffuse and

unsystematic locally;

[I]t is difficult for the [province director] to develop and implement provincial programs in a coherent way. Provinces usually do not have the capacity and experience for developing educational plans . . . The provinces lack the capacity to analyse sector issues, assess the quality of education, or evaluate alternative strategies. The government is keenly aware of these shortcomings and plans to use this and other projects to enhance the management capability of the provinces (World Bank 1996, http://www.worldbank.org/pics/pid/id3987.tx).

In their negotiations of loans with the Government of Indonesia, IMF has demanded a de-

centralisation of the state apparatus, including the education sector. This is in accordance

with a growing international demand for new and more flexible management models,

coming together with a general demand for the removal of any cultural aspects that hinder

free flow of economic capital. Implicit in this ideology is a specific dominant development

17

model, a model more suited to the so-called “New Economy”, or post-Fordian economy,

stressing the need for “team spirit, problem-solving skills and originality” (Witte

2000:240). With increased global competition in the labour market, the workers are

expected to become more “flexible, self-managing, entrepreneurial and responsive to a

rapidly changing environment” (Morley 2003:2). It has therefore been argued that;

The shift in production methods from Fordist to post-Fordist is paralleled by a call for decentalisation in education, just as the old "bureaucratic" form of production was paralleled by educational bureaucracies (Witte 2000:240).

In order to produce these new workers, the education system also requires new skills from

teachers;

Teachers that are subjected to a bureaucratic, rigid, hierarchical system seem no credible role- models for teamwork. Teachers who are dictated by overly prescriptive centralized curriculum requirements are unlikely to convey to students the sense of love for learning and curiosity that are prerequisites for the new skills (Witte 2000:240).

The question is whether educators and policy makers, in their effort to reform the

educational field, actually need to uncritically adopt neo-liberal models of educational

management. We have already noticed that the Taman Siswa for a long time has advocated

a person-centred learning context where the teacher more indirectly guides the internal

development of the child. According to this intellectual tradition, Indonesia should be more

self-reliant. When critically assessing development strategies in relation to increased ‘self-

reliance’, i.e., a balance between outward orientation and local anchoring, it is of course

important to analyse 'self-reliance' at different levels, e.g. technology, economic capital,

human resources and so on (Witte 2000:232-33). In relation to this issue we may also

question whether it is realistic to educate the majority of Indonesians for a position in a so-

called post-industrial economy. Is it actually in accordance with Indonesia’s access to

’human capital’?

A reading through the Indonesian literature on educational reform (Atmadi and

Setyaingsih 2000, Buchori 2001, Jalal and Supriadi 2001, Suyanto and Hisyam 2000,

Tilaar 2000) gives the impression that Indonesian intellectuals seem to bow to the

requirements of the new global economy, that is, to the increased liberalisation of labour-

and trade markets. The severe effects of the financial crisis have overwhelmed many and

convinced them of Indonesia’s closed relationship with the rest of the world.

The debate has also been intensified by some recent surveys, which showed that the

Indonesian education system is the lowest ranked in Southeast Asia. According to the Third

International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) Indonesia ranks among the world's

18

six most poorly educated countries in mathematics and science. This stands in stark

contrast to neighbouring Singapore which topped the Study in Mathematics and was

second only to Taiwan in science (The Jakarta Post, Dec 07 2000). There is little doubt that

these results are seen as a threat to national pride, not least among the technocrats at the

Ministry of national education. The surveys are further interpreted as an evidence of

Indonesia’s lost competitiveness.10

Reform and implementation: the problem of subjectivity

Despite radical changes in educational discourse, the government does not spend

equivalent resources on the implementation of the system at the level of particular schools.

This relative ignorance is of course due to financial limitations. But I do also think it is

partially explained by an idealistic bend among the bureaucrats, perhaps an inheritance

from a long period with fetishising Pancasila, the national ideology. If only the philosophy

is good enough, it will more or less automatically filter down through the system. It implies

a reductive understanding of how ideas work and of the formation of consciousness and

social identities, including the construction of the ‘New Indonesian Man.’ The government

therefore seems not to recognize the time and effort it takes to transform deeply ingrained

cultural models.

The Indonesian professor of education, H.A.R. Tilaar (2002) has attempted to

develop a pedagogy more in line with the actual situation in Indonesia, and he claims that

the science of pedagogy in Indonesia is barren as it does not deal with fundamental

questions related to the development of a transformative pedagogy more suited to the

Indonesian conditions and challenges. According to Tilaar, a major reason for the current

crisis in the education system is that pedagogy has lost its grounding in the world of the

human and social sciences, but rather serves as an instrument of the ruling powers (Tilaar

2002:xx, xxx). One of the fundamental questions he asks is what it is that characterises the

“Indonesian Man”.11 He argues that Indonesian educators are imprisoned by Western

10 The felt seriousness of this situation is strengthened by the growing demand for educational services by the expanding middle classes in Asia. This has created a market for education, and especially higher education, which in Asia as a whole is worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Singapore is now actively positioning itself to become an education hub to take advantage of the market for prestigious foreign degrees. In order to compete with Australia, United States of America and others, Singapore government helps to establish partnerships between Singapore's top universities and international world-class universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since the demand for higher education will increase faster than the gross domestic product growth rate, much of the demand will have to be provided by the private sector because the state sector cannot grow fast enough (The Straits Times Interactive, Jan 17, 2003). 11 ‘Man’ in this phrase is a translation from the Indonesian ‘manusia’, which means man in sense of a general non-sexist ‘human being’. This also holds good for the phrase “the New Indonesian Man”. I have elsewhere (Gjelstad 1999) discussed Indonesian definitions of what it means to be an Indonesian person with reference to a vast anthropological literature on ‘selfhood’ in various part of Indonesia, focusing especially on “Javanese self” (Geertz 1983, Siegel 1986).

19

models that take as their departure social conditions very different from the demands that

one is facing when dealing with the development of Indonesian children. Pedagogical

thinking in Indonesia is only concerned with applied matters, not with developing more

fundamental theories of education that are suitable to the Indonesian nation and its people

(ibid.:xxi). Despite the rise of pedagogic departments in Indonesia, there is almost no

published work dealing with fundamental educational processes relevant to the Indonesian

nation.

Tilaar is critical to traditional pedagogy because it takes as its point of departure the

‘isolated child’, and he advocates a transformative pedagogy realizing that education forms

part of a changing society and where education can influence these changes. This view

supports the (democratic) idea that students should learn to be active participants in society.

According to Tilaar, pedagogy as a discipline can only develop when it is supported by

surrounding disciplines dealing with the fundamental question of “what is man?” from

different angles. This means that it can only flourish at strong universities. An important

framework for Tilaar as for the majority of the Indonesian literature on education reform is

that we have now entered a new millennium characterised by steadily accelerating social

changes. This radically transforms the conditions in which children grow up. In an open

society pedagogy needs to be as dynamic as the cultures it is embedded in. Following

Buchori (2001), he argues that students need to learn to actively influence the development

of their environments. Buchori (2001) argues that education needs to be anticipatory in the

sense that they have to prepare the students not for the present-day realities but for realities

that lies a generation or two ahead.

If educational and social theory in Indonesia has to fight against Western

individualist assumptions it also has to tear away from integralist models where there is no

dualism between state and individual, state and civil society, and where there is no need for

individual basic rights against the state because individuals are seen as organic parts of the

state (Bourchier 1996:81-82, Parker 2003:8). The president and the political elite operate as

father-figures and rule the state as their own families, and they regard themselves as the

ones that best know the interest of the citizens (Parker 2003:8). There is then no room for

legitimate opposition (ibid.). All this is claimed to suit the Indonesian national character

(ibid.). This is in line with the defining traits of Pancasila society: unity, harmony and

consensus (ibid.).

Despite much critique of the existing educational system, the literature on education

reform, including Tilaar and Buchori, does not seem to be very concerned with the

horizons of teenagers’ own lives, what youths themselves regard as decisive steps in their

20

own personal developments. A better understanding of their life worlds would place us in a

better position to communicate with the students and to build upon their already acquired

cultural skills and competences, such as surfing the World Wide Web and crafting their

own personal identities through constructing particular lifestyles. The cultural world of

youths is a major issue in my own research among young people in urban Central-Java,

where I am trying to gain a better understanding of the interconnections between processes

of learning and formation of personalities.

The rise of popular youth culture and of educational reform should be related to

changes in the system of production. In the late 1980’s the Indonesian government

deregulated the financial sector and opened up state monopolies in banking, television,

aviation and other sectors resulting in better employment opportunities outside the state for

professionals dominating the middle classes (Robison 1996:83). Many observers have

noted an increasing contradiction between the government’s interest in following the logic

of capitalism and their interest in preserving an “authoritarian corporatism” (e.g Robison

1996:96). This contradiction is not least visible in the growing media industries. For

television companies, the most lucrative programs, like American TV-serials, might

undermine the ideals of “corporatist authoritarianism” (Robison 1996:9) and the kind of

national integration and unity that the New Order government supported.

This expansion of the media sector, including a proliferation of new lifestyle

programs and magazines, has contributed to the transformation of consciousness among

broad segments of the population, not least among urban teens. An interesting hypothesis is

that the emergence of the broader reformation movement, similar to the emergence of a

youth-specific consciousness, is an immanent part of the current phase of an expanding

capitalist modernity. With Paul Willis (1990) we could argue that new media technologies

and the increased importance of cultural commodities has created a ‘common culture’ that

is subversive to top-down communication. Paul Willis claims that the rise of common

culture, which he celebrates for its democratic feature, will put the field of education under

an intense pressure. Its conservative tendency will make it “totally irrelevant to the real

energies and interests of young people and no part of their identity formation” (Willis

1990:147). What seems to be the case is that the sense of self that is developed in arenas

outside the school are denied and ignored in the classroom, which in turn generates a

“radical subjectivity”, rather than a constructive dialogue between personal desires and

social values (Shaw 1996:188).

In order to push this argument further, I would like to bring in Hardt and Negri’s

thesis (2000) that a current post-modernization of the world “marks a new mode of

21

becoming human” (Hardt and Negri 2000:289). According to the authors, we need to take a

closer look at the changes in the notions of the human and of humanity that develop with an

emerging informational economy” (ibid.). I want to discuss this problem in relation to two

issues that have been dealt with in this chapter. The first issue is the new forms of

subjectivity that are manifest in Indonesian youth cultures, the other the new ideals of the

“educated person” that comes with the education reform. It seems to me that the cultural

production of these two personalities is linked together, and that it is worth discussing to

what extent these evolving personalities might be analysed as an effect of an expanding

global ‘Empire’ where multilateral organizations play a decisive role.

Implicated in this trend is a commodification of personal and collective identities, a

development which is also visible in the educational field as students as well as their

parents often are more attracted to the consumption of titles, diplomas, degrees, certificates

and other forms of distinctions rather than knowledge per se (cf. Gerke 2000). The

consumption of knowledge is thus entangled in other forms of consumption practices, and

it seems to rest on the idea that one is defined as modern by possessing the symbols of

modernity (ibid.). I will argue that there is a similarity here between how young people see

diplomas as sign of personal success and the way the government considers the physical

building of schools as a sign of progress. This means that especially private institutions

become part of commodity market, selling tokens of social standing.

Popular cultures have the potential to mythologize core institutions of the urban

space (trade centres, computers, cellular phones, hotel lounges, shopping malls etc). In this

way personal aspirations and dreams, collective narratives, and political economy are tied

together and made into a cultural style. In urban landscapes huge advertising posters

offering courses in the English language, Business & Administration, Computer & Media

etc. which together with discothèques and shopping malls constitute an emergent

semiology of a global world. These new distinctions are not least visible in the various

teenager milieus. It is in the context of growing awareness of young people’s experiences

and aspirations that the growing commercial educational markets, offering courses in

Computer science, English etc, should be seen. These emerging niches strongly appeal to

the aspirations of the new generation for a more cosmopolitan way of life. I think we need

to draw this context into our analysis of the processes whereby the new so-called

'knowledge society' displaces alternative paths to knowledge.

Re-embedding education in local conditions

22

When discussing projects of nation-building we must remember that they always look

somewhat different from the margins: in the outer islands of Indonesia it is often seen as a

Java-project, and among the poor the political game is often regarded as an elite project.

With revitalisation of the provincial and district level one could hope that educational

institutions might play a role in rewriting regional histories and contribute to know-how

that could enhance local production and resource management.

In my view it is not enough to adjust some of the distortions made during the New

Order Era. Rather the whole problem complex related to the relationship between education

and political economy must be re-evaluated. The school we want to see come true cannot

be seen independent of the question of what kind of society we want to develop. I will

argue that we need to explore and research possible new roles of education in creating new

development paths in Indonesia. We therefore need to identify what levels of scale are most

appropriate for linking education, culture, economy and society.

If productive synergy-effects between educational development and production

systems at a district level are to be achieved, a more contextualised form of teaching and

learning should be stimulated. This might also have the positive effect of strengthening

local engagements in school activities (an important aim of education reform) and reduce

children’s and parents’ alienation from education as well as from local cultural traditions.

At the same time it might provide local trade and industry with badly needed skills and

competencies. Due to the new law on regional autonomy in Indonesia, governments at the

district level have a stronger ability to support education institutions, including higher

education. Also other local stakeholders, such as industry, private donors, and fee payers

are invited as financial partners (cf. DGHE 2003:14).12 The decentralisation process should

in my view be used to make more holistic and more viable paths of development, thus

being able to bridge various social fields at the level of local forms of life.

Consequently, the efforts of governments (at national, provincial and district level),

business interests and donors should be coordinated into a policy for a better linkage

between education and local production systems, and to create development models more

sensitive to local resources – both human and natural. This might inspire and motivate local

entrepreneurship, which requires solid knowledge of local environments. From an early age

students might then invest their dreams and plans for the future into local systems, thus

12 The list of references enclosed with this important government document reveals that it is heavily influenced by World Bank policy papers, such as World Bank 2000, 2001, but also by Unicef (1995). The WB influence is evidenced in the idioms of increased university-industry-government collaboration, good governance, quality assurance, external control, new management models stressing internal accounting and audit, certification, the abolition of the civil servant system and introduction of more flexible engagements, student centred and more flexible learning approaches etc.

23

directing themselves toward the potentialities of local growth. They would also learn to

deal with alternative ways of utilizing local resources and to take part in local decision

processes.

Such a level of integration is not least required if the national education reform is to

be implemented. As mentioned above, a most critical aspect of the reformation process is

related to its implementation at the level of particular schools. All local forces and

resources are then needed. The new education paradigm does not regard people only as

passive objects of development but rather seeks to develop local life through involving the

people in active decision-making.

One important task is to contribute to building up local expertise in bureaucracy,

higher education, companies and so on. Another strategy is to empower local institutions

like rotating credit institutions, work communities, religious organisation and traditional

schools. There is very little research done regarding the variable effects on the politics of

multi-lateral organisation on local production systems. We also lack research on how

universities now are transformed at province level due to the autonomy laws, and how they

variously respond to multilateral organizations.

Education, identity-formation and civilizational processes

In this chapter I have demonstrated the immense importance of education for national

identity formation in a country like Indonesia whose 220 million inhabitants consist of

more than 300 ethnic- and linguistic groups spread over 6000 islands. Its modern history

also shows that higher education makes a difference in the formation of national leadership.

Indonesia is still facing the challenge of transforming a mainly agrarian society into a

modern industrious one, and the scope and speed of recent globalisation intensifies the

dilemma of developing a country in a way that suits both local/ national conditions and

global competitiveness. Indonesia is, like neighbouring countries such as Malaysia and

Thailand, currently in a process of loosing out in the global competition of low-tech

manufacturing. Indonesia therefore has to upgrade both its workforce and its research in

order to compete on a higher technological level. This can only be accomplished by using

more resources on education and by redesigning the existing system.

It has also been pointed out that identity-formation occurs at various levels at the

same time (local, provincial, national, and transnational - such as Islam and ASEAN).

Identity-formation is part of a broader civilizational process and the building of educational

institutions therefore entails more than just identity-formation. This is well pointed out in

Tjomsland’s chapter in this book. She also illustrates the importance of regional

24

cooperation, especially in relation to some key challenges in the Arab World (e.g. oil and

water). All this point toward the importance of having political institutions that are capable

of identifying what kinds of infrastructures or production systems that should be developed

(related to access to natural and human resources). This is in contradiction with the

ideology of letting students choose themselves, referring to the fundamental dilemma

between individual freedom and collective needs.

From the very beginning, the major goal of the national education system in

Indonesia has been to create Indonesian citizens that possess the skills, knowledge and

character that fit in with the political elite’s visions of national development. The task of

creating these identities and subjectivities was from the beginning seen as one of

transformation and reform, not least manifest in the notion of “The new Indonesian man”.

This chapter has analysed the continuities and discontinuities in these shifting development

models, using the concept of the ‘educated person’ analytically to investigate the parallel

definitions of what kind of skills, intelligence, wisdom, disciplines and so on that constitute

these varying notions of the knowledgeable person under various economic paradigms and

governmentalities.

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