With over 61 million students and 5 million teachers, Indonesia’s education system is the fourth largest in the world. Within this enormous system, however, lie many unmet dreams. The opportunities afforded to children in Indonesia still very much depend on where they live, their income and (less so) their gender. Ahmad Fadli, a teacher who recently moved from a poor school in rural Sumatra to an international school in Bali explains the differences in opportunities this implies.
‘When I began teaching English under the mango trees of rural Sumatra, I didn’t think of it as extraordinary. It was simply what we had — no electricity at times, limited textbooks and blackboards made from painted plywood. I taught in schools where students walked kilometers on dirt roads, where paper had to be reused, and where teacher training came more from experience than workshops. But learning still happened. Students came with unmatched curiosity, and teachers like me stayed with unshakable hope’, Ahmad said.
‘Years later’, he continued, ‘as I prepare to teach in a global school in Bali, the contrast is unavoidable: air-conditioned classrooms, digital tools, international curriculum, and professional development opportunities. While I am grateful, I also carry with me a sharp awareness that what I left behind is not just a place, but a global reality for millions of educators.”
In Indonesia, learning levels have not been internationally competitive for a while. In 2022, as the latest GEM Report showed that it received unenviable results showing that less than a quarter of students could read with understanding and fewer than one in five were proficient in mathematics at the end of lower secondary school.
Achieving quality education in the country stretches the capacity of the system. Indonesia has the worst trained teacher/pupil ratio in Southeast Asia. Even though poverty levels have steadily declined over the years, education receives less from the budget now than it did in 2015. On top of some of these challenges came the COVID-19 pandemic, during which schools were closed for two months more than the OECD average during the pandemic.
Ahmad asked the question all those grappling with SDG 4 consider daily: ‘We speak often of “21st-century education” but we must ask: who gets to access it — and who gets left out of the conversation?’
His resounding feeling on making the transition from Sumatra to Bali was that teachers working in deprived contexts are not being given enough of a voice. While education policies and international frameworks call for inclusion and equity, the voices of teachers in rural, under-resourced communities are still missing. ‘Their stories are not data points. They are the human face of education inequality. As long as rural teachers are excluded from policy conversations, education reforms will remain incomplete — however well-intentioned’.
The feedback loop, so often forgotten, is an essential part of what makes a policy reform successful – or not. That oversight so often regretted. The 2023 GEM Report cycle on technology in education had a particularly strong message on this point: technology cannot simply be placed in a school with a ‘job done’ attitude. How technology works in practice, for who, in what context and with what benefits for learning is something that teachers and school leaders are best placed to comment on.
‘We need to redefine what global education looks like, not only by bringing technology to remote areas, but by bringing remote voices to global platforms. We need less one-way delivery and more two-way dialogue — not just about rural schools, but with rural teachers. Equity cannot be achieved from the top down. It must begin by listening — truly listening — to those who live the very inequities we seek to fix’, Ahmad said.
He offered one example of this. The word ‘innovation’ is a buzzword in international education, but one that is mostly associated with new start-ups or new donor-led initiatives. Ahmad wanted to make the point that adaptation in the form of innovation is happening in deprived areas just as much; it requires just as much respect and attention.
‘Global initiatives often promote innovation through technology or international benchmarks. But in places like Sumatra, innovation means turning discarded cardboard into teaching aids or translating curriculum into local dialects. Innovation is not always high-tech. Sometimes it is high-touch. In these conditions, we built learning environments rich in care, improvisation, and resilience. I believe that’s also global education — though rarely recognized as such’.
Visit the WIDE website to see how wide inequalities remain in education in different countries.
