Education in Indonesia

Here’s a crummy piece by Brian Whitaker, the climax of which is the news that the miserable intellectual achievements over the last few hundred years of societies dominated by Islamic orthodoxy are all the fault of - quelle surprise! - the USA and Mr Blair:

But [Ziauddin] Sardar wondered whose fault that was. “Who is keeping these despots in place?” he asked. “Who is going to Libya and saluting Colonel Gadafy? Who imposed the Shah on Iran and Suharto on Indonesia?”

That will go down well in some circles, but it doesn’t explain the failure of segregationist Muslim schools in, for example, Britain and Holland. Here’s Polly Toynbee:

However, I want to come back to Mr Sardar, who in the course of the Whitaker piece says that

It’s a bit sad that Mr Sardar, “a Muslim writer and critic” with a case to prove, gets Muslim superpower Indonesia’s history so wrong. In fact the transition to independence took place from 1945 to 1949, and as far as I am aware the first institution in Indonesia to be called a university didn’t emerge until the foundation of the University of Indonesia in 1950. I believe that this was set up on the back of a so-called Emergency University organised by the Dutch in 1946 and that it was never discriminatory, at least not in terms of the Javanese.

And there I would end, were it not for the fact that the rest of the household is watching Salsa Rosa, a truly dreadful Spanish chat show, so here’s some more history to demonstrate that, for all the stupidity and evil of colonial economics, Dutch paternalism was not all bad in educational terms.

Although the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) did not get involved in education, the transfer of power to a Dutch colonial government in 1799 led to gradual change. Jan Sihar Aritonang in his doctoral dissertation says that in 1808 Governor Daendels ordered several Javan regents “to organize schools for indigenous children with a curriculum which included Javanese culture and religion so that the children would grow up to become good Javanese. He also initiated the opening of several vocational schools.”

By the time the Japanese invaded in 1942, there was a well-established system of so-called European schools, which provided for Europeans and the indigenous aristocracy, schools that provided elementary, primary and secondary education for the children of Chinese merchants and indigenous civil servants, and village schools which provided five years of education using first the local language and then Malay. This was supplemented by an important mission education sector, Muslim schools, and by a large numbers of so-called wilde scholen, schools that sprang up in the 1930s which were effectively unregulated by the colonial authorities and which may have taught twice as many children as the official institutions. This site claims that by 1940 40% of indigenous children were going to school.

Although most Europeans (and some indigenous parents) chose to send their children to Europe for (secondary and) further education, as far as I am aware local higher education was not officially segregated either along religious or racial lines. Among the most famous students of Bandung’s Technical High School (founded 1920) in the pre-war era were Sukarno, the future dictator, and Dutch patriot and Moluccan nationalist, Johannes Alvarez Manusama, whose father also attended this college. Other institutions founded in this period include a law school in Batavia (1909, reincorporated 1924), a school for the education of local doctors (1909, became a medical high school in 1927), a faculty of letters and philosophy in Batavia (1940), and a faculty of agriculture at Buitenzorg.

I’m afraid there’s no time to talk about the increasing pressure education in Indonesia has faced from Islamic fundamentalists in the last 20 years because it is now officially bed-time.

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