Friday, March 29, 2024 | 13:42 WIB

TEACHER SHORTAGE ON THE HORIZON: A looming crisis threatens to derail Jokowi’s human capital vision

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KI DARMANINGTYAS
KI DARMANINGTYAS S has been involved in the education sector since he was still a student at Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM). In August 1982, he served as a teacher at Binamuda Junior High School and Muhammadiyah Senior High School in Panggang district, Gunungkidul, Yogyakarta. At Binamuda Junior High School, he conducted many educational experiments, including on schoolbased management (SBM), transforming it from a school on the brink of collapse to one with complete facilities that still exists to date. He hold a Bachelor of Philosophy degree from UGM. Currently, he is the administrator of Association of Taman Siswa Family (‘Garden of Students’ an educational movement) – PKBTS in Yogyakarta.

Superior human capital? 

One of the Jokowi second-term administration’s areas of focus is building a superior human capital. Educational institutions are certainly the “cauldron” in this endeavor. Superior human capital can only be realized if the education process is delivered by competent and well-paid teachers. Otherwise, how can we expect a different result? 

Every year, the government recruits civil servant candidates and police and armed forces cadets. Why not reduce the quota for civil servants and increase that for PNS teachers? The government should be able to distinguish which types of public services that can be provided through outsourcing and which ones that cannot. Population administration services, licensing, and so on are the types of services that can be carried out by outsourced personnel. Therefore, the quota for civil servant candidates in these agencies can be transferred to sectors that cannot be outsourced, such as education and health. 

It’s a bit ironic that the government is recruiting less PNS teachers and nurses but continues to recruit more civil servants for other government agencies. This is a sign that the government also does not understand their own slogan to build a superior human capital. This proves how they have no idea how to accomplish it. It is impossible to produce a superior human capital from haphazard education sector. It should be no brainer that superior human capital can only be produced by superior teachers. In our case, we are lacking teachers who meet the minimum requirements, let alone superior teachers. 

Despite the authoritarian political system, the New Order regime under President Soeharto, supported by superior technocrats from the University of Indonesia, indeed had a good plan to prepare Indonesian human resources. During the oil boom in the 1970s, the New Order government massively built SD Inpres in every village/sub-district. Larger villages even got more than one elementary schools. This was followed by mass recruitment of elementary school teachers. Similarly, in the 1980s during the logging boom, the government initiated the establishment of public junior high schools and recruitment of junior high school teachers, as well as the construction of community health centers (puskesmas) in villages/sub-districts. Larger villages/sub-districts also got more than one junior high schools and puskesmas. 

Then, after the number of junior high school graduates increased, in the 1990s the New Order government established public senior high schools and vocational schools in all sub-districts, especially in densely-populated Java. The vast majority of PNS teachers we have right now are a legacy of the New Order policies. Now President Jokowi is extolling the importance of having a superior human capital, but there are no real policies to realize this vision; it’s just all talk, no walk. (Ki Darmaningtyas)

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