The lack of capable students is concerning. There must be concrete steps to improve our basic education system.
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The lack of capable students is concerning. There must be concrete steps to improve our basic education system.
As disclosed by this daily on Thursday (14/12), the capability of students at the basic education level to read and write, count, and deal with science is very poor.
From the results of the Assessment of Indonesian Students Competence (AKSI) for the elementary school level, carried out by the Education and Culture Ministry, about 77 percent of students lack skills in mathematics. Only about 20.5 percent of them have satisfactory capabilities in mathematics.
In reading comprehension, about 46.8 percent of students were included in the “poor” category and 47.1 percent in the “satisfactory” category. On the students’ capabilities in science, about 73.6 percent were considered “poor” and only 25.3 percent “satisfactory”.
The figure, of course, is not ideal for the progress of the nation. High quality of human resources is needed to enable Indonesia to compete with other countries.
Elementary school students are aged 7 to 12 years at present and will be 35-40 years old when Indonesia reaches its 100th anniversary of independence in 2045. At that time they will be in the important positions in various sectors, including the government. If their quality is poor, of course it will affect the competitive edge of the nation. Therefore, evaluation and improvement of the basic education system needs to be carried out.
The evaluation and improvement are intended, among others, to determine weaknesses in the current basic education system, at the same time to formulate a basic education system that is more suitable considering the challenges of the time. The improvement has to be serious because the number of its participants is not small.
Based on data from the Education and Culture Ministry, the number of students in the elementary school stage in 2016/2017 is 4.7 million. They are spread in 132,022 state elementary schools (89.5 percent) and 15,481 private elementary schools (10.5 percent).
Besides evaluation and improvement of the basic education, it should consider the improvement of the quality of teachers, who are the spearheads of the progress of education quality. Teachers’ qualifications at schools are not in line with the mandate of Law No. 14 of 2005, which obliges teachers to be university graduates.
Out of 1.58 million elementary school teachers, only 1.33 millions are university graduates, while 250,453 are senior high and junior high school graduates. It is apparently difficult to improve the quality of education without improving teachers’ education.
Improvement of teachers’ quality has to be in line with the improvement of the basic education system and improvement of the education facilities. These joint steps are expected to give birth to highly skilled students.