Jakartass Home thoughts from abroad. Alien thoughts from home.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.
- Abraham Lincoln
………………………………………………………………………….       
On National Education Day, May 2nd, Minister of Education and Culture Mohammad Nuh said: “The national exam plays only a little part in the country’s education system. The most important thing is to ensure that all children receive education services.”

Since 2008, spending on education has been set at 20 percent of the total budget thanks to a constitutional amendment. The 2013 state budget for education shows an increase of 6.7 percent to Rp.331.8 trillion ($34.9 billion) from the Rp.310.8 trillion allocated in 2012, and is above the mandated 20 percent of anticipated government state revenues (Rp.1,508 trillion)

As reported in the Jakarta Globe, President Yudhoyono said that the budget would be used to continue the School Operational Aid (BOS) program for elementary and junior high school students, build 216 new schools while renovating hundreds of old ones, as well as to support the Scholarship for the Poor, which is aimed at 14.3 million indigent students across the country.

“We will also launch the Universal Secondary Education program (PMU) through school operational aids for 9.6 million high school students. We must make the most of the growing education budget to improve the quality of education and expand the outreach of it.”

However, only Rp.66 trillion, just under 20 percent of the total, is allocated to the Education and Culture Ministry, with most of the money set to go directly to other districts through programmes such as BOS and PMU.

It is clear from World Bank stats published last year, but only given up to 2010, that in some areas  improvements have been made. For example, the primary school (SD) pupil-teacher ratio (the number of pupils per teacher) was down to 15.97 from 20.41 when President SBY was first elected, while the secondary schools’ (SMP and SMA) pupil-teacher ratio was reduced to 12.18 from 14.2.

However, these figures are distorted because remoter areas of Indonesia, which commonly lack electricity, running water and/or telephone coverage, suffer from a shortage of teachers. The figures also do not take into account teacher absenteeism of around 20 percent because many in the public school system have to take second or even third jobs to supplement their meagre incomes.

What the teachers provide is determined by the national curriculum set by each incoming Minister of Education. The country is about to have yet another imposed on students and teachers, its third in just ten years. The net result, as shown by The Learning Curve, an “analysis of school systems’ performance in a global context” from the Economist Intelligence Unit, is that Indonesia is at the very bottom of 40 ranked countries, including Hong Kong. Key benchmarks were, among others, knowledge comprehension, teaching standards and the graduation rate. Since the last survey in 2006, the cognitive skills in Maths and Science have regressed.

A main stated reason for the new curriculum is to reduce the number of subjects that students are taught; some senior high school students are currently expected to study as many as seventeen (yes – 17) subjects in one year. Minister Mohammad Nuh argued that an emphasis on an integrative thematic method, was “suitable to promote students’ cohesive thinking and to boost their entrepreneurial skills.”

If “cohesive thinking” means an understanding of inter-connectedness and the nature of consequences, then one can but agree. However, this understanding can only be achieved through the exploration and development of personal interests and talents and a curriculum which encourages creativity and understanding within a communal, pluralistic context.

Howard Gardner, who developed the theory of Multiple Intelligences, argues that “students will be better served by a broader vision of education, wherein teachers use different methodologies, exercises and activities to reach all students, not just those who excel at linguistic and logical intelligence.”

As for “entrepreneurial skills”, having recently witnessed the activities at Sumur Batu, Bekasi’s landfill for its rubbish, it was obvious that the vast army of workers there have those skills, albeit without having received formal education, if any, beyond elementary school. Here on the streets of Jakarta, the hawkers galore, peddling plastic household supplies or vending ‘meals on wheels’, the corner kiosks and food warungs, and the unofficial parking attendants are all evidence of entrepreneurial endeavour.

Where it is lacking, I suggest, is within the corridors of power.

Writing in the Jakarta Post, Donny Syofyan opines: “While the country’s formal schooling system remains centralized, rigid and resistant to innovation from the public, various movements and alternative educational innovations currently springing from the grass roots should be appreciated as representing civic resistance and disappointment.”

Of course, a major reason for disappointment has been the recent cock-up of the distribution of the question papers and answer sheets for the Ujian Nasional, the national exams, which, in spite of an inflated budget, arrived days late for senior high school students in eleven provinces  Calls have been made for the Minister to resign, yet few have offered an analysis of the exams themselves. Teachers detest having to teach to them, partly because they are reflections of the narrow mindsets of the bureaucrats who write them – and fail to check them.

Which leads to the question: what’s the point of asking students crap questions, let alone distributing them?!

This is but one example taken from one of the up to twenty versions – to prevent cheating it is said – of the recent junior high school English exam.

I now call the UN the UM – the Ujian Monyet.

Apasi, apasi?
Scratches head, grunts – A-B-C-D?
Ah, ini!

On May 1st, former vice president Jusuf Kalla defended the National Examination (UN) as the enhancement of education in Indonesia. He said it took 10 years for a perceived policy impact.

Need we wait that long?
………………………………………………………………………….       
View – ‘Educating Indonesia‘, an Aljazeera documentary
Read
- The Learning Curve
“Good teachers are essential to high-quality education. Finding and retaining them is not necessarily a question of high pay. Instead, teachers need to be treated as the valuable professionals they are, not as technicians in a huge, educational machine.”
- Multiple Intelligences
………………………………………………………………………….  
First published in Jakarta Expat magazine 20.5.13

Some three years ago, I mentioned Rectory Gardens in Clapham, London SW4, where I lived as, some might say, a hippie squatter.

I wasn’t then, and have never been.

What we did do was improve the houses we were squatting in both structurally and decoratively and lived peaceful lives slightly outside the ‘mainstream’ of societal expectations. I built up a collection of plaster dogs because flying ducks were in short supply and when I left with the expectant mother of Son No.1 for a community worker job in West Cumbria I’d just started fitting a kitchen.

A year or two earlier, I’d found a garden gnome on the vacant plot on the main road, took it home, painted it in nice colours, probably called it Roger, and put it behind the bar of the boot scraper outside the house I first lived in, not seen but along the longer stretch of the L to the left, and left it to dry.

Next morning it had gone!

He should have told me he wanted to move because I reported him missing to the local police! Not wishing to seem to be over-frivolous, I had gone primarily to report the loss of a bunch of keys, but the station sarge was more interested in the fate of Roger.

“Do you know, sir,” he told me, “that’s the commonest crime in Clapham.”

Later that day, a police search squad actually spent an hour looking for it/him.

This is not Roger

I only mention this because I do have an affinity with garden gnomes and I’d love to have a family move into the front garden of Jakartass Towers Redux.

And if I were back in London I’d almost certainly pop along to the annual Chelsea Flower Show which is on this week because, this being the centenary of the Royal Horticultural Show, RHS has lifted their ban on the category of ‘brightly coloured mythical creatures’.

Gnomes have personalities – view this gallery.

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.
– Anaïs Nin

We were comfortable with each other, discussing ants and leeches, which we were informed have thirteen brains, and other aspects of life and everything. We’d already eaten and quaffed enough Bintangs and red wine at Ya ‘Udah, so I told friends that we ought to make sure that we’d arrive reasonably early for the Indonesian launch of simakDialog’s sixth album, The 6th Story.

I was really looking forward to this as I already heard some of the album last year, albeit still at the production stage, when I spent an evening with group leader Riza Arshad and Leonardo Pavkovic who will release the album internationally in August on his MoonJune Records.

I thought that this being Friday night, the end of the working week, that the gig at Goethe Haus would be sold out. After all, with the price of admission being just Rp.50,000, which included a copy of the CD, and that the rain storm had passed fairly quickly, making the effort to arrive in sufficient time to grab seats was important.

Nearly five years ago, two of us had been to the launch of simakDialog’s last album, Demi Masa, and the 301 seater hall at Goethe Haus was packed.

We’d also all recently been to a gig there featuring the leader of simakDialog (sD), Riza Arshad, the group’s percussion section of Endang Ramdan and Erlan Suwardana playing kendang and Cucu Kurnia with his ‘metal toys’, with German guitarist Kai Brückner  and his compatriot Paul Kleber on bass. There had been quite a reasonable atttendance for a Thursday evening, so my hopes were high.

It seemed that my foresight was confirmed when we found a full car park and limited space on the road outside. However, sadly, I was wrong: the cars were there for students attending German lessons and, if we’d wished, we could all have sat alone in a row apiece.

Which I did.

Following a short introductory speech, which included as the reasons for the low turnout the usual excuses for not being anywhere in Jakarta – rain and traffic, we settled down to what, in my view, became the best simakDialog gig I’ve been to.

In an interview for Culture Shock! Jakarta, Leonardo described Riza as “an amazing pianist with a great touch and an ECM sensibility [and] I know the best of him is still to come.”

The majority of the tracks on the last three sD albums released on MoonJune, and indeed the new one, feature Riza mainly playing a Fender Rhodes with but a few snatches of acoustic piano. I hadn’t felt, yet had wanted, that sensibility, the transcendental flow and feel which epitomises ECM recordings and concerts.

The first tunes played were Stepping In and Lain Parantina, the first two tracks on the new CD, and I noticed three key differences from before; firstly, Riza was playing an acoustic grand piano, with no sign of electric keyboards. Although he sat almost with his back to us, he wasn’t taking a back seat: he was able to observe, conduct almost, the rest of the group. And he wasn’t barefoot; he had eschewed what he told me some time ago was “a traditional dress code. I do this to try to catch the ‘spirit’ of the music. I can’t imagine what would be my performance if I should dress any other way.”

“More confident” would be my answer because last Friday in that I couldn’t say that I heard echoes of his cited early influences, such as Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett. His playing was ‘his’ in that ‘solo’ passages were sufficiently strong and fluent to make me wonder what a solo piano album recorded with few takes would be like. He had that sought for transcendental flow, and I marvelled at what I was hearing.

A key word on the sleeve notes of simakDialog’s albums is ‘soundscapes’. Riza added these, quite subtly, to the intro of the third piece, One Has To Be, from both Baur (’96) and Patahan. Other pieces played from previous albums were Worth Seeing, also from Patahan, and All In A Day from Trance Mission (2002), the album in which Riza began to incorporate ‘ethno-percussion’.

It was a different Tohpati too. This time round, the ace guitarist, with his own releases on MoonJune, didn’t leave me “sublimely, gorblimey gobsmacking” as before. He sat still, generally looking down as he focussed on his ‘sounds’ which were rarely stand alone solos. When he did let rip, I had to wonder just where he’d dragged his inspiration from; there was little trace of his power trio, Bertiga. This was something else, a demonstration of absolute mastery of his instrument and its effects and a confirmation that, as Leonardo says, he has a “rightful place among the highest echelon of today’s guitar giants.”

To his right stood perennial cohort, the bassist Adhitya Pratama, who quietly and virtually immobile underpinned the grooves.

On the other side of them sat the three percussionists, crosslegged on floor mats. Endang Ramdan played on sD’s Patahan in 2007 and Erlan Suwardana joined for Demi Masa (2008). Both play kendang, Sundanese drums struck melodically and rhythmically with both hands and a foot. A new recruit is Cucu Kurnia who has ‘metal toys’, one of which is a cymbal.

When the three ‘competed’, they were the crowd pleasers. Perhaps because there was such a low audience turnout, the group wasn’t out to impress us. It was obvious that this is a group of friends who enjoy each other’s company and have fun sharing musical games, the sharing of challenges. The obvious joy the whole group had in being in tune with each other was infectious.

And so this was a night to remember. Catch them if you can.

Apparently, reports the Guardian, “hand-drawn maps are enjoying a renaissance as contemporary artists use their imagination, creativity and humour to breathe new life into the traditional craft of cartography.”

Artists – both famous and amateur – [are] seeking to put the romance back into this centuries-old art form.

The map above, drawn by Liam Roberts, shows my last stomping ground in the UK.

He says that “the tree is drawing water from London’s great giver of life, the Thames, depicted here as part of the underground watertable. Some of my favourite unique and characterful pubs and cafes are represented here either as hanging fruit, or as nests: I thought this made sense as these places can be sources of sweet sustenance, as well as temporary dwellings.”

Anyone looking for old maps of Jakarta, some of which were presumably hand-drawn, check out Bartele Santema’s Gallery.  

Mind you, apart from the one of the Transjakarta Busway network, even up-to-date maps are hard to find!

(Click map for larger image.)

When asked, 30%-39.9% of Indonesians said that they wouldn't want to live next to someone of another race.

So, how do you get on with your neighbours?

Incidentally, according to this map — Indonesia is one of the most ethnically diverse.

Go figure!

Stan Lhota has written to say that he is "currently writing a book chapter on ecotourism in primate swamp habitats in Borneo (Kalimantan, Sabah, Sarawak and Brunei), with a special focus on proboscis monkeys.
 

"There is very little evaluation research published on this topic, so I am therefore searching for personal experiences of people involved in ecotourism – as conservationists, entrepreneurs or tourists.

Do you think you can help commenting on the book chapter from your own experience in Borneo? If so, please email him.

A crime committed in the name of religion is the greatest crime against religion.
– Banner of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation website

Most years since 1997 the foundation has presented a World Statesman Award to “heads of state who have exemplified their commitment to freedom, human rights, peace and respect for religious and ethnic diversity, and endeavor to advance these essential democratic values on the international scene.”

In 2004, the recipient was Sir John Bond, the Group Chairman of HSBC Holdings. Last year (2012) HSBC agreed to pay a $1.9 billion fine in a case “for allowing itself to be used to launder a river of drug money flowing out of Mexico, and other banking lapses.”

HSBC Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver said, “We accept responsibility for our past mistakes. We have said we are profoundly sorry for them, and we do so again. The HSBC of today is a fundamentally different organization from the one that made those mistakes.“ 

Last year’s choice of Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, was sharply criticised there because of his “long and well documented record of abuse and assault on democracy and rights.”

And now it is SBY who is the chosen one.

He may well “endeavor to advance … essential democratic values on the international scene”, but he is not known for this on the domestic scene.

Indonesia’s Human Rights Working Group, a coalition of NGOs, has stated that SBY is “undeserving” of the award “because the failure of law enforcement, and [that] he has far too often remained silent on the rights abuses suffered by members of minority faiths in Indonesia, and the lack of efforts to nurture tolerance, have contributed greatly to the current climate of intolerance in Indonesia.”

In March, SBY’s spokesman Julian Adrian Pasha criticised the authors of a new Human Rights Watch report, In Religion’s Name: Abuses against Religious Minorities in Indonesia  (.pdf download) saying it was “provocative” and lacking objectivity. Pasha dismissed the concerns as “naïve” and insisted that incidents of intolerance and violence by militant Islamist thugs against Indonesia’s religious minorities were merely expressions of “friction between groups”.

Those comments by Pasha – who admitted he had not read [the] report in any detail – are disturbing, but unsurprising, given the Indonesian government’s glaring failure to adequately respond to how Indonesia’s religious minorities, including several Protestant groups, Shia Muslims, and the Ahmadiyah, are targets of increasing intimidation, threats and, too often, violence. Just ask the Ahmadiyah community in Cikeusik, Banten province, in western Java. *

And now, in the past week, comes news of what I would term the most blatant example of the “greatest crime”.

A six-month investigation by Michael Bachelard for Good Weekend, a magazine insert of the Sydney Morning Herald, has exposed a ten year programme to remove West Papua’s youth, some as young as five, to Islamic religious schools in Java for “re-education”.

A report (.pdf) published by the International Crisis Group in 2008 suggested that new religious forces in Papua (with links to past inter-religious strife in the Moluccas and Poso in Central Sulawesi) have brought with them a doctrinal intolerance that complicates communal relations.

Bachelard writes: One of those religious forces was Al Fatih Kafah Nusantara (AFKN), which makes no bones about its intention to convert, and to use religion for political ends. Leader Fadzlan Garamatan says AFKN has brought 2200 children out of Papua as part of his program of nationalistic “Islamicisation”. “

Papuan boys at the Daarur Rasul pesantran, outside Jakarta. Photo: Michael Bachelard

What Fadzlan Garamatan says is an overt statement of AFKN’s contravention of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Indonesia is a party, which says that children should not be separated from their families for whatever reason, even poverty.

Furthermore, Article 20 states categorically that: “Children who cannot be looked after by their own family have a right to special care and must be looked after properly by people who respect their ethnic group, religion, culture and language.”

This is reinforced by Indonesia’s Child Protection Act 2002 which includes a five-year jail penalty for those who convert a child to a religion different from their family’s.

The USA’s Dept. of Labor’s Bureau of International Affairs issued a report  last year which stated that Indonesia is primarily a source country for child trafficking. Children, mostly girls, are trafficked to Malaysia, Taiwan and the Middle East; they are subject to forced prostitution and forced labor in domestic servitude. Children are also trafficked internally for the purpose of domestic servitude, commercial sexual exploitation (including sex tourism in Bali and Riau Island) and fishing.

Child trafficking for forced labour, commercial sexual exploitation, religious conversion … and all taking place under SBY’s watch!

We all know that he will do nothing, and I doubt that the Appeal of Conscience Foundation will offer the Award to someone who actually deserves it.

So much for reformasi, eh?
……………………………………..
* Video