ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the education system in Indonesia. Many of the problems with EE that appear in the ethnographic chapters (Chapters 7–10) are problems with the education system in general. Indonesia is an education “success story” because it has gone from almost universal illiteracy in 1942 to almost universal literacy; almost 80 per cent of young people aged 16–18 years attend senior high school. Gendered inequalities in access to schooling are almost gone; inequalities by socioeconomic status, province and remoteness remain.
The main objectives of education in Indonesia are to create loyal, and pious, citizens, and to produce effective workers. There is now great attention to the poor quality of education. Indonesia consistently scores very poorly in international tests (such as PISA). The low level of subject knowledge and poor pedagogical capabilities of teachers are often blamed. There have been wide-ranging efforts to improve the quality of teaching. However, schools have not taught young people to think critically or constructively about their environment. Students’ understanding of complex systems such as natural ecosystems is inadequate; they accept the often-dubious knowledge that is transmitted to them as truth; they do not know how to use their knowledge of “facts” to solve real-world problems.
