Education in Indonesia falls under the responsibility of the Ministry of Education and Culture (Kementerian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan or Kemdikbud) and the Ministry of Religious Affairs (Kementerian Agama or Kemenag). In Indonesia, all citizens must undertake nine years of compulsory education which consists of six years at elementary level and three in secondary level. Islamic schools are under the responsibility of the Ministry of Religious Affairs.
Education is defined as a planned effort to establish a study environment and educational process so that the student may actively develop his/her own potential in religious and spiritual level, consciousness, personality, intelligence, behaviour and creativity to him/herself, other citizens and the nation. The Constitution also notes that there are two types of education in Indonesia: formal and non-formal. Formal education is further divided into three levels: primary, secondary and tertiary education.
Schools in Indonesia are run either by the government (negeri) or private sectors (swasta). Some private schools refer to themselves as “national plus schools” which means that their curriculum to exceeds requirements set by the Ministry of Education, especially with the use of English as medium of instruction or having an international-based curriculum instead of the national one. In Indonesia there are approximately 170,000 primary schools, 40,000 junior-secondary schools and 26,000 high schools. 84 percent of these schools are under the Ministry of National Education (MoNE) and the remaining 16 percent under the Ministry of Religious Affairs (MoRA). Private schools only comprise 7% of the total schools number.
Early kingdoms
Education system in the era of Hindu-Buddhist civilisation is called karsyan. Karsyan is a place of hermitage. This method was highly religious, aimed to draw oneself closer to God.
Era of Islamic states
The emergence of Islamic state in Indonesia is noted by the acculturation of both Islamic tradition and Hindu-Buddhist tradition. At this time period, pondok pesantren, a type of Islamic boarding school was introduced and several of them were established. The location of pesantren is mostly faraway from the hustling crowd of the city, resembling the location of Karsyan.
Colonial era
Elementary education was introduced by the Dutch in Indonesia during the colonial era. The Dutch education system are Query strings of educational branches that were based on social status of the colony’s population, with the best available institution reserved for the European population. In 1870, with the growth of Dutch Ethical Policy formulated by Conrad Theodor van Deventer, some of these Dutch-founded schools opened the doors for pribumi (lit. native Indonesians). They were called Sekolah Rakjat (lit. folk school), the embryo of what is called Sekolah Dasar (lit. elementary school) today. In 1871 the Dutch parliament adopted a new education law that sought to uniform the highly scattered and diversified indigenous educational systems across the archipelago, and expand the number of teacher training schools under supervision of the colonial administration. The budget for public schooling was raised in steps from ca. 300,000 guilders in 1864, to roughly 3 million guilders by the early 1890s. Most often however the education development were starved of funding, because many Dutch politicians feared expanding education would eventually lead to anti-colonial sentiment. Funding for education only count for 6% of the total expenditure of the colonial budget in 1920s. The number government and private primary schools for native had increased to 3,108 and the libraries to 3000 by 1930. However spending sharply declined after the economic depression in 1930.
Technische Hogeschool te Bandoeng, opened as a branch of Delft University of Technology.
The Dutch introduced a system of formal education for the local population of Indonesia, although this was restricted to certain privileged children. The Schools for the European were modeled after the education system in Netherlands itself and required the proficiency in Dutch language. Dutch language was also needed for higher education enrollment. The elite Native/Chinese population who lack Dutch language skills could enroll in either Dutch Native or Chinese Schools. The schools were arranged in the following levels.
Early education
Pre-School education in Indonesia is covered under PAUD (Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini, lit. Early Age Education) that covers Taman Bermain (playgroup) and Taman Kanak-Kanak (kindergarten, abbreviated as TK). PAUD is under direct supervision and coverage of Directorate of Early Age Education Development (Direktorat Pengembangan Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini). From the age of 2, parents send their children to attend Taman Bermain. From the age of 4, they attend Taman Kanak-Kanak. Most TK arrange the classes into two grades, grade A and grade B, which are informally called kelas nol kecil (little zero grade) and kelas nol besar (big zero grade) respectively. While this level of education is not compulsory for Indonesian citizens, it is aimed to prepare them for primary schooling. Of the 49,000 kindergartens in Indonesia, 99.35% are privately operated schools. The kindergarten years are usually divided into “Class A” and “Class B” students spending a year in each class.
Public primary and secondary education
Indonesians are required to attend twelve years of school. They must go to school six (or five, depending on the institution) days a week from 6:30 a.m. until afternoon (usually 2 or 3 p.m.). They can choose between state-run, nonsectarian public schools supervised by the Department of National Education (Depdiknas) or private or semi-private religious (usually Islamic) schools supervised and financed by the Department of Religious Affairs. Students can also choose to participate in extracurricular activities provided by the school such as sports, arts, or religious studies. However, although 86.1 percent of the Indonesian population is registered as Muslim, according to the 2000 census only 15 percent of school-age individuals attended religious schools. Overall enrolment figures are slightly higher for girls than boys and much higher in Java than the rest of Indonesia.
A central goal of the national education system is not merely to impart secular wisdom about the world but also to instruct children in the principles of participation in the modern nation-state, its bureaucracies, and its moral and ideological foundations. Beginning under Guided Democracy (1959–65) and strengthened in the New Order after 1975, a key feature of the national curriculum—as was the case for other national institutions—has been instruction in the Pancasila. Children age six and older learned by rote its five principles—belief in one God, humanitarianism, national unity, democracy, and social justice—and were instructed daily to apply the meanings of this key national symbol to their lives. But with the end of the New Order in 1998 and the beginning of the campaign to decentralise the national government, provincial and district-level administrators obtained increasing autonomy in determining the content of schooling, and Pancasila began to play a diminishing role in the curriculum.
A style of pedagogy prevails inside public-school classrooms that emphasises rote learning and deference to the authority of the teacher. Although the youngest children are sometimes allowed to use their local language, by the third year of primary school nearly all instruction is conducted in Indonesian. Teachers customarily do not ask questions of individual students; rather, a standard teaching technique is to narrate a historical event or to describe a mathematical problem, pausing at key junctures to allow the students to call out responses that “fill in the blanks”. By not identifying individual problems of students and retaining an emotionally distanced demeanor, teachers are said to show themselves to be patient, which is considered admirable behaviour.
Children aged 6–11 attend primary school, called Sekolah Dasar (SD). Most elementary schools are government-operated public schools, accounting for nearly 93% of all elementary schools in Indonesia. Students spend six years in primary school, though some schools offer an accelerated learning program in which students who perform well can complete the level in five years.
Three years of junior high school (Sekolah Menengah Pertama, or SMP), which follows elementary school. Some schools also offer an accelerated learning program in which students who perform well can complete the level in two years.
After completion of them, they may be attend three years of high school (Sekolah Menengah Atas or SMA). Some high schools offer an accelerated learning program so students who perform well can complete their level within two years. Besides high school, students can choose among 47 programmes of vocational and pre-professional high school(Sekolah Menengah Kejuruan or SMK), divided in the following fields: technology and engineering, health, arts, craft and tourism, information and communication technologies, agro-business and agro-technology, business management. Each requires three years of study. There are academic and vocational junior high schools that lead to senior-level diplomas. There are also “domestic science” junior high schools for girls. At the senior high school level, three-year agricultural, veterinary, and forestry schools are open to students who have graduated from an academic junior high school. Special schools at the junior and senior levels teach hotel management, legal clerking, plastic arts, and music.
Students with disabilities/special needs may alternately opt to be enrolled in a separate school from the mainstream called Sekolah Luar Biasa (lit. Extraordinary School).
The completion rate for Indonesian primary schools is high. Indeed, 100 percent of the relevant age-group had completed primary education as of 2003. However, it must be noted that numerous problem plague this statement, considering the widespread corruption in Indonesia extends to schools too. (For example, a headmaster/mistress may pay the inspectors supervising a test to ignore any cheating attempts by the students or even give out blatant advice on how to complete a certain question, etc. etc.) The gross enrolment rate for primary schools was 100 percent, but it decreased to 62 percent for secondary schools and 16 percent for post-secondary schools. There were nearly equal numbers of girls and boys in primary and secondary schools; in the late 2000s, the ratio was 96.7 girls to 100 boys. Depdiknas reported that in school year 2007–8 there were 63,444 kindergartens, with a total enrolment of 2.8 million pupils and 176,061 teachers. Later statistics are available for primary and secondary levels for school year 2008–9. They indicate that there were 144,228 primary schools, with a total enrolment of 26.9 million students and 1.5 million teachers; 28,777 junior secondary schools, with a total enrolment of 8.9 million students and 629,036 teachers; 10,762 general senior secondary schools, with a total enrolment of 3.8 million students and 314,389 teachers; and 7,592 vocational senior secondary schools, with a total enrolment of 3 million students and 246,018 teachers. Additionally, there were 1,686 special education schools from kindergarten to senior secondary levels, with a total enrolment of 73,322 and 18,047 teachers.
Teacher-training programs are varied and gradually being upgraded. For example, in the 1950s anyone completing a teacher-training program at the junior high school level could obtain a teacher’s certificate. Since the 1970s, however, primary-school teachers have been required to have graduated from a senior high school for teachers, and teachers of higher grades have been required to have completed a university-level education course. Remuneration for primary- and secondary-school teachers, although low, compares favourably with that in other Asian countries such as Malaysia, India, and Thailand. Student–teacher ratios also compare satisfactorily with those in many Asian nations: They were 23.4 to 1 and 18.8 to 1, respectively, for primary and secondary schools in 2004; that same year, the overall averages for Asia-Pacific countries were 22 to 1 and 18 to 1, respectively.
By 2008, the staff shortage in Indonesia’s schools was no longer as acute as in the 1980s, but serious difficulties remain, particularly in the areas of teacher salaries, teacher certification, and finding qualified personnel. In many remote areas of the Outer Islands, in particular, there is a severe shortage of qualified teachers, and some villages have school buildings but no teachers, books, or supplies. Providing textbooks and other school equipment to Indonesia’s 37 million schoolchildren throughout the far-flung archipelago continues to be a significant problem as well, especially in more remote areas.
maybe thats all that i know about indonesian education system.
unresulted thinking 