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Anew nadir was reached in the Indonesian education system with the recent fiasco over the presence of sexually explicit material in an elementary school exam. People are genuinely and understandably shocked to learn that such details could have made it onto what is essentially a state document.

To make matters worse, the offending material is couched in Indonesian too grammatically poor to be featured as examination material. Even the title, “Pengusaha Bandel di Krangkeng Bareng Mak Erot” (“Naughty Businessman Put in Cage with Mak Erot”) is grammatically wrong. The prefix “di,” used to create passive voice, should not be separated from the root verb “krangkeng.” The prefix should only be rendered separately when it is used as a preposition to indicate a place.

The scandal, however, provides an apt illustration for the new education minister on the actual state of our education standards. Our national education curriculum is riddled with anachronisms, bigotry and trivia. It is not an exaggeration to say that many of our junior high school graduates are incapable of simple arithmetic, let alone effective use of our language.

Still, instead of redressing the reality by producing a first-class national curriculum, the National Education Ministry has so far churned out dogmatic, impractical and uninspiring materials for our students to imbibe.

A clear example would be the PKn (citizenship class) syllabus. The parents of a usually brilliant Grade 1 elementary student in Bandung were last year summoned to school because their child failed the PKn exam. In fact the student failed because she had chosen to leave blank many of the answers on the test. When her parents asked her why she had done this, she replied, “Some of the questions are stupid, like ‘Girls wear skirts and boys wear trousers,’ so I refused to answer if this is wrong or right, because we girls also wear trousers.”

In the end, however, the girl had to capitulate because her teacher insisted that the material was what the national syllabus dictated. Her own perceptive conclusions through observation were useless in the face of the almighty syllabus.

The bright girl may have been somewhat harsh when she called the syllabus “stupid,” but how are we supposed to label it when it also teaches that girls wear their hair long while boys wear theirs short?

This kind of anachronism led to another incident at an elementary school in Surabaya. A Grade 2 student in a state school happened to be a Christian while most of his classmates were Muslims. Unfortunately the lesson over the appropriate hair length was used by his some of his classmates to taunt him about Jesus Christ’s long hair. In the end, the Christian student retorted by asking just why the Prophet Muhammad, in his Arab flowing robes, wore skirts when as a male he was supposed to wear trousers.

Our less-than-intelligent PKn syllabus also includes some home “truths” such as “Mother cooks in the kitchen and does the housework” while “Father goes out to earn a living for the family.” Whoever created our education syllabus may be wishing for an orderly and uniform society to live in but reality speaks otherwise. In some households, it is Mother who is the breadwinner. In others it is Father who does the cooking because he is simply better at it than Mother.

The creator — perhaps compiler is a better word, as the end product is far from being creative — of our national syllabus has indeed failed to realize that such stereotypes never work because human beings learn best through experience and observation. When our children observe that reality is different from the version presented by the National Education Ministry, it debases our own education system, which now costs taxpayers a fortune because it makes up 20 percent of our state budget.

Those who make their careers at the ministry should be made aware that our workforce is among the least skilled in the world because it is not adaptive. It is not adaptive because early on in their schooling, students’ ability to draw conclusions based on experience is dulled by the national syllabus.

The paternal nature of our education system is also a great killer of creativity as well as tolerance, when — as the saying goes — necessity is the mother of invention. Our syllabus makers should be aware that in unconventional households where Mother is the breadwinner, such a solution may have come about as a result of necessity. Unconventional social solutions are necessarily creative and creativity is the backbone of survival. So is it reasonable for the education syllabus to condemn creativity?

The fact stands that our education system has so far produced a less-than-brilliant younger generation, especially if you happen to have been born in underprivileged families, which more often than not eliminates any possibility of your attending a good state or private school. A junior high student in Sidoarjo wrote to a national newspaper recently that she was against the visit of porn actress Maria Ozawa, also known as Miyabi, to Indonesia because her presence could encourage lewdness among youth and “soil our morality.”

It is intriguing to speculate whether the student’s sentiments are her own conclusions or a mere echo of her school teacher’s or the local cleric’s. If she had taken the time to consider the matter creatively, she might have realized that before the sensational coverage of her impending visit, Miyabi could have entered Indonesia quite easily as a tourist. And if she were more aware of her surroundings, it may have dawned on her that nearby in Surabaya lies one of the biggest prostitution complexes in the world, which sprung up before the world had heard of Miyabi.

As embarrassing as the Mak Erot exam paper scandal is, it is also an uncanny reminder that our education system is, generally speaking, one big joke. The trivial and demeaning nature of the exam material is in fact indicative of the nature of the system itself. Questions must be asked why our overseas workers in Malaysia, most of whom are either junior high or high school graduates, are seen as less skilled and intelligent than their Filipino counterparts. More disconcertingly, when we watch the scenes of Bendera vigilantes training to invade Malaysia, we must wonder if it would have been so easy to brainwash these people had our education system better prepared them for life.

Johannes Nugroho is a writer based in Surabaya.