Education in Indonesia is now in the transition time from
Kurikulum Tingkat Satuan Pendidikan (KTSP) or in English known as School Based
Curriculum to 2013 curriculum which focused on building students’ characters.
Total subjects for KTSP are 11, but in 2013 curriculum will have 6 subjects
only, which are religion, civics, Bahasa Indonesia, mathematics, art & culture,
and also Physical Education.
Furthermore, science and social will be integrated with Bahasa Indonesia.
I think that this merging in subjects is quite extreme, because students don’t
learn thing specifically anymore, and it might create low level of mastery in
each of those subjects.
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Before, English in elementary school is an elective subject.
The new curriculum removes English from elementary school, which as an English
teacher to be I found this is pretty unreasonable. Because later it probably
means that the first time for some students learning English is in Junior High
School. Even when they were exposed with English in the young age most schools
are not able to provide the students with good English. How about later?
Another policy that is changed is removal of Information and
Technology subject in junior high school & senior high school, because
government thinks that technology should be integrated and had already
integrated to students’ life. But I disagree with this; I think government over
generalizing the students. Because as I live in small city like Aceh, for
example the student that my mom is teaching in one of junior high school in
Lhokseumawe and also the teachers, may not even know how to turn on a computer.
They are not computer literate. On the other hands, science subjects (mathematics,
physics, biology and chemistry) and also religion subject will have additional
one hour contact time each as the government’s strategy to produce characterful
students.
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The implementation of this policy is being done gradually,
first it was applied in the schools with accreditation A in 295 cities in 33
provinces in Indonesia, which starts in July 2013, and hoped to be fully
implemented in all over Indonesia in 2015. The early stage of this
implementation showing good response, the teachers said that this builds the
characters and student become more active in the class room. But this is the
response in from selected schools with good teachers, facilities, and
excellence students. But later, how about the implementation in other schools?
Because talking about schools in Indonesia it is not just about the school in
Jakarta, Bandung and other big cities, but also the schools in rural places
like Aceh and Papua.
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The problem that the curriculum faced is that the level of understanding of teachers is
still very low. And it needs long process to give training to the teachers.
From a survey, 7 out of 10 teachers are still not sure what 2013 is all about.
If teachers and school is not prepared, the whole school management can be
ruined and will affect the students’ performance and most importantly, students
are not guinea pig, Government can't just make a new curriculum and experiment
it on the children. I think before they change the policy, they should train
the teachers with enough facilities first and when the teachers are ready, they
can start changing.
Overall, I think the governments plan is too rushing, it is not
prepared well. It is too early to take such as big decision to change the whole
curriculum. Why don’t they check and improve first what’s wrong with the
previous curriculum rather than create a new one and confuse the teachers and
the students themselves. Maybe the intention is good, want to raise the
standard of education. But applying curriculum that had already used in the
developed or even modern country, and starts to compare the students in this
developing country, it’s just not right.
Hope this transition will bring Indonesia to a better
quality of education!
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