I have absolutely no idea how the education system works in this country. My niece has just finished her Junior High School (SMP) and she is currently sitting her final exams. She wants to continue to the Senior High School at the same school. It shouldn't be too much of a problem, I thought, considering in the past three years she has always come in the top ten of her class and has been very active organising events for the school.
However, in order to go to a higher level, she has to pass an entrance test again, along with other aspirants who don't come from her school, as if she is a new pupil to the school and of course, have to pay the Senior High School fee. She has sat this test a few weeks ago and is now told that she does not qualify to be accepted for the Senior High of that school. She is given this news even before she sits for her finals in the said school.
Now, as she is stressing out doing her Junior High School exams, she has to think about what school she could go to for her Senior High. Whatever that school is, one thing is clear, she still has to sit a test in order to be accepted to that school. For a teenager who is already in the middle of a difficult phase in her life, all these tests and exams and the uncertainty of which good school she could get into, it is a trying a time.
And it is not just the school children, the parents also get into hysterics this time of the year as they ferry their children from test to test, spending a lot of time, effort and money in between, with more money to spend once the children are accepted into the school which, more often than not, is not of their choice.
May be there is a reason for all this, but if I were that school, it would be in my interest to see how far I've succeeded in educating my charges to develop their full potentials and encourage them to go to a higher level in that school rather than treating them as if I have never dealt with them in the past three years. Surely their performance and contribution to the school are better indicators of their eligibility to continue to a higher level than a short entrance test on a given day and open for anybody?
Unless of course, what the school is looking for is particular test results and the entrance fee from new students rather than being interested in the students themselves.
May be other schools work differently, but I get the impression that there is a lack of continuity between Junior High and Senior High so that pupils end up at having to go to different schools, have different friends, different teachers and different teaching methods that they need to get used to again. Studying is already hard work without having all these additional stresses to take on.
If state schools are highly competitive and each year have increasing fees, private schools are so exorbitantly expensive these days that parents practically have to fork out in entrance fees, monthly tuition fees and other necessary expenses, to the amount that is probably a lot more than what the average Indonesian employee gets in his monthly pay packet.
And this is just at the high school level. We are not even talking about university level, which could cost the parents an arm and a leg. All this without the guarantee of getting a well-paying job that would be able to pay all that investment back at the end of it.
Moreover, these days, employers are not satisfied with just a Bachelors degree, especially if the young hopefuls didn't graduate from the country's top universities. In which case a Masters degree is getting to be mandatory requirement. Otherwise, be prepared to join the queue of the unemployed or be paid a salary that wouldn't even cover a child's school fee at a national plus school in Jakarta.
For people of means where school fees are not a problem, the road to success for the child starts at pre-school all the way to private schools offering IB certificates and costly universities at home or abroad with high quality international level education. While for the indigents it is a lucky thing if they could send and keep their children at school instead of forcing them to labour. Theirs are worlds that are so apart they could be from different planets.
For the majority of Indonesian parents of so-so income however, who desire nothing more than see their children have a better future and more well-off than they are, the road to educating them is a long, expensive and arduous one. It is made even more painful when, after all the effort and the money, the quality of education is not geared for the benefit of the child's development and intelligence in order to ensure their success in the world, but only for the interests of the school.
I could only feel for my fourteen-year old niece. She's having a hard enough time figuring out who she is without having to worry about which school would accept her.
(Desi Anwar: First published in The Jakarta Globe)
http://www.dailyavocado.net/writers-block/92-writers-block/744-getting-educated.html
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