PENDIDIKAN BAGI KAUM TERPINGGIRKAN
PARA PEMBACA YANG BUDIMAN
SYALOOM....
Saya menemukan artikel yang amat berguna, dan patut untuk disimak. Artikel ini dimuat di Koran "The Jakarta Post, tanggal 6 Oktober 2011", dan ditulis oleh Prf. Dr. Anita Lie, seorang guru besar dari Universitas Katolik Widya Mandala,Surabaya. Saya copy seluruhnya untuk anda:
Education for the marginalized
Anita Lie, Berkeley, California | Sat, 09/24/2011 8:00 AM
Despite all the programs and aid by the government, corporations and humanitarian organizations, children in remote areas remain marginalized and impoverished.
The official statistics from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), for instance, indicate the inequalities across provinces, especially from the junior high school level upward. Site visits to schools in some remote areas reveal a more disturbing picture of the savage inequalities. While the privileged few in big cities have access to world-class education, children in remote areas are being disadvantaged in the system.
Challenges in enhancing the quality of education in remote areas in some parts of Sumatra, Kalimantan and Papua include a shortage of competent and dedicated teachers, lack of access and discontinuity between students’ home culture and the school culture.
Overall, Indonesia does not suffer from a shortage of teachers. A ratio of 2.7 million teachers for over 40 million school-age children is more than adequate. The problem is in the distribution of teachers across the provinces. Most teachers avoid placements in remote areas.
The more remote an area is, the less likely it is for students there to receive an education that meets the national standards. Teachers’ absenteeism is rampant in those areas, and the local education authorities do not exercise monitoring, supervision or evaluation at the sites.
It is time for the education authority at the national level to use other measures beyond the grades of the national exam to evaluate the quality of education in each region and province.
The lack of access to quality education is related to economic disadvantages as well as geographical situations. In some remote regions in Papua, children have to walk for days and relinquish the comfort of living with their parents in their own communities to reach the nearest school. Of course, only the most highly motivated students would go through such a personal sacrifice for a long-term goal of attaining education.
The majority of children (and parents) would succumb to the existing conditions of poverty. While long-term separation from parents at an early age is not advisable in most cases, boarding schools seem to be a necessary option to provide more access.
The last challenge of discontinuity between students’ home culture and school culture is the most hidden and yet highly obstructive.
It is long overdue that we revisit our practices of the highly-acclaimed motto “Unity in Diversity”. In the formal education context, what predominantly prevails is unity “over” diversity. In the name of uniformity, students have to conform to school culture and norms.
Worse, in some cases, teachers despise the students’ local culture and see it as an impediment to learning and mainstreaming. Many teachers who come from Java and other more developed areas to teach in remote areas still hold on to their hierarchical constructs that put them in higher places of knowledge and wisdom and see their students’ communities as inferior “subjects”.
School failures within the marginalized communities are seen as inevitable rather than results of the teachers’ ignorance of all the contributing factors in a student’s learning process. Numerous studies show that uprooting individuals from their cultural identities is detrimental to their self-esteem and academic achievement.
Teachers who would be placed in any region other than their own hometown should receive ethnographic training and preparation. It would be even better if teacher training colleges incorporated sessions on intercultural awareness and understanding as part of the pre-service program.
In the media, the spotlight occasionally is given to the very few individuals who survive their existing conditions and even excel against all odds. Olympiad-type competitions sometimes bring about such individuals.
This phenomenon may also be used politically to conceal policy failures or commercially to earn money from desperate local governments. This can be a misleading and dangerous practice, as it is analogous to giving candy to malnourished children.
Whether we like the picture or not, it has become part of our reality as a nation. Saving children from further poverty requires a long period of hard work grounded on good intentions for a shared vision of the nation and on appropriate understanding of pedagogy for disadvantaged communities.
The writer is a professor of education at Widya Mandala Catholic University in Surabaya. She is currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley on a Program Academic Recharging (PAR) grant from the Indonesian Education Ministry.
Dalam hal ini, putra-putri Papua harus menunggu berapa lama agar bisa mendapatkan pendidikan yang memadai. Pemikiran dan pertemuan sudah sering terjadi, dan menelan biaya besar. Yang sungguh amat dibutuhkan adalah langkah kongkrit, terencana, dan terarah, serta dibiayai sungguh-sungguh dan diberi tenaga yang mau mengabdi.
Sebagai sesama manusia, dan juga sebagai orang beriman, mewujudkan kebaikan lewat peningkatan mutu pendidikan merupakan pelaksanaan ibadah yang amat membahagiakan hati sesama dan direstui Allah.
SYALOOM....
Saya menemukan artikel yang amat berguna, dan patut untuk disimak. Artikel ini dimuat di Koran "The Jakarta Post, tanggal 6 Oktober 2011", dan ditulis oleh Prf. Dr. Anita Lie, seorang guru besar dari Universitas Katolik Widya Mandala,Surabaya. Saya copy seluruhnya untuk anda:
Education for the marginalized
Anita Lie, Berkeley, California | Sat, 09/24/2011 8:00 AM
Despite all the programs and aid by the government, corporations and humanitarian organizations, children in remote areas remain marginalized and impoverished.
The official statistics from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), for instance, indicate the inequalities across provinces, especially from the junior high school level upward. Site visits to schools in some remote areas reveal a more disturbing picture of the savage inequalities. While the privileged few in big cities have access to world-class education, children in remote areas are being disadvantaged in the system.
Challenges in enhancing the quality of education in remote areas in some parts of Sumatra, Kalimantan and Papua include a shortage of competent and dedicated teachers, lack of access and discontinuity between students’ home culture and the school culture.
Overall, Indonesia does not suffer from a shortage of teachers. A ratio of 2.7 million teachers for over 40 million school-age children is more than adequate. The problem is in the distribution of teachers across the provinces. Most teachers avoid placements in remote areas.
The more remote an area is, the less likely it is for students there to receive an education that meets the national standards. Teachers’ absenteeism is rampant in those areas, and the local education authorities do not exercise monitoring, supervision or evaluation at the sites.
It is time for the education authority at the national level to use other measures beyond the grades of the national exam to evaluate the quality of education in each region and province.
The lack of access to quality education is related to economic disadvantages as well as geographical situations. In some remote regions in Papua, children have to walk for days and relinquish the comfort of living with their parents in their own communities to reach the nearest school. Of course, only the most highly motivated students would go through such a personal sacrifice for a long-term goal of attaining education.
The majority of children (and parents) would succumb to the existing conditions of poverty. While long-term separation from parents at an early age is not advisable in most cases, boarding schools seem to be a necessary option to provide more access.
The last challenge of discontinuity between students’ home culture and school culture is the most hidden and yet highly obstructive.
It is long overdue that we revisit our practices of the highly-acclaimed motto “Unity in Diversity”. In the formal education context, what predominantly prevails is unity “over” diversity. In the name of uniformity, students have to conform to school culture and norms.
Worse, in some cases, teachers despise the students’ local culture and see it as an impediment to learning and mainstreaming. Many teachers who come from Java and other more developed areas to teach in remote areas still hold on to their hierarchical constructs that put them in higher places of knowledge and wisdom and see their students’ communities as inferior “subjects”.
School failures within the marginalized communities are seen as inevitable rather than results of the teachers’ ignorance of all the contributing factors in a student’s learning process. Numerous studies show that uprooting individuals from their cultural identities is detrimental to their self-esteem and academic achievement.
Teachers who would be placed in any region other than their own hometown should receive ethnographic training and preparation. It would be even better if teacher training colleges incorporated sessions on intercultural awareness and understanding as part of the pre-service program.
In the media, the spotlight occasionally is given to the very few individuals who survive their existing conditions and even excel against all odds. Olympiad-type competitions sometimes bring about such individuals.
This phenomenon may also be used politically to conceal policy failures or commercially to earn money from desperate local governments. This can be a misleading and dangerous practice, as it is analogous to giving candy to malnourished children.
Whether we like the picture or not, it has become part of our reality as a nation. Saving children from further poverty requires a long period of hard work grounded on good intentions for a shared vision of the nation and on appropriate understanding of pedagogy for disadvantaged communities.
The writer is a professor of education at Widya Mandala Catholic University in Surabaya. She is currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley on a Program Academic Recharging (PAR) grant from the Indonesian Education Ministry.
Dalam hal ini, putra-putri Papua harus menunggu berapa lama agar bisa mendapatkan pendidikan yang memadai. Pemikiran dan pertemuan sudah sering terjadi, dan menelan biaya besar. Yang sungguh amat dibutuhkan adalah langkah kongkrit, terencana, dan terarah, serta dibiayai sungguh-sungguh dan diberi tenaga yang mau mengabdi.
Sebagai sesama manusia, dan juga sebagai orang beriman, mewujudkan kebaikan lewat peningkatan mutu pendidikan merupakan pelaksanaan ibadah yang amat membahagiakan hati sesama dan direstui Allah.
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