INDONESIA: A man of the people

When Indonesia's ex-strongman Soeharto died recently, the media was unsurprisingly awash with commentaries on his 32-year rule and its legacy. One commentator I looked for in particular was the noted educationist Professor Mochtar Buchori, a frequent contributor to the English-language The Jakarta Post. A voice of sanity, reason and tolerance, Pak Moch, as he is known, did not disappoint. In a piece called “Conversation with a taxi driver” he related how he had drawn out the views of a Jakarta cabbie, a member of a breed that works very long hours. The professor was once again demonstrating his populist touch, keeping in contact with the Common People.

Long a rather lonely advocate of a thorough overhaul of Indonesia's national education system at all levels – primary, secondary and tertiary – Pak Moch, a former teacher training institute principal, believes education reforms should cover teacher training, pedagogy, curriculum and school management. Speaking in his unostentatious but comfortable Central Jakarta home, this stocky man with a round face typical of the Javanese, expressed the view that the system was deficient in all these areas.

Using the phrase "necessary intellectual equipment", he argues that Indonesian students are being sold short and that the quality of those entering university is deficient and below international standards. This is a hard row to hoe. There is considerable inertia among the political class, including at ministerial level as well as among elected members of the national assembly (DPR), of which he was once a member. Educational reform does not readily strike a chord as the very recent decision of the government to reduce the education budget by 15%t amply demonstrates.

Pak Moch, a one-time leading figure in former President Megawati's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), was well placed as head of the DPR commission on education to observe and comment on the failure of the Indonesian political class to grasp the urgency of the points he was making. Although maintaining his quintessentially Javanese sense of 'halus' (smooth, refined) manners, he betrayed to me sorely-felt frustration. In essence he was calling into question PDI-P's credentials as a reformist party.

A man of great integrity, Pak Moch proved this when taking a stand inside the party against the 'power brokers' around leader Megawati Soekarnoputri, in particular the little constellation of opportunists associated with her husband Taufik Kiemas. Taufik was, for a time, one of the most powerful people in Indonesian politics outside the so-called Cendana Clan of Soeharto and his family. The 'Prof' said publicly that he 'did not want to be part of a rotting process in the party'.

In a political milieu in which self-advancement and self-abasement go readily together, this is all the more commendable. "I want to have a clean party," he said, "So they kick me out."

With a PhD in education from Harvard University and a former head of the Indonesian Institute for the Sciences, he is well-versed in developments in education worldwide. He is also a speaker of flawless English and keeps well abreast of what is going on elsewhere.

How reforms in the education system at both primary and secondary level would affect Indonesia's tertiary education system is, of course, a matter of concern. These would necessarily have to include scrapping the multiple choice system of testing which favours rote over other forms of learning, and reducing the bureaucracy involved in assessing entry requirements for universities and colleges.

Under the present dispensation, secondary school students face a formidable 14 or 15-element curriculum and are tested in each as frequently as every fortnight. It is precisely this kind of battery-hen learning that Pak Moch thinks should be put aside in favour of approaches that provide "the necessary intellectual equipment" of which he speaks.

Perhaps, after many years of wilderness-living, Pak Moch's message is beginning to get through. A recent seminar on Indonesia's national education system pronounced it a failure, a view echoed editorially by The Jakarta Post – this despite an awareness that one of Indonesia's great unsung post-colonial success stories has been to transform the basic literacy rate from an appalling pre-World War II 6% t to one in the 80%s.

Although plagued by ill-health, Pak Moch continues quietly to contribute to the intellectual and cultural life of the country as it struggles to secure its young democracy. His columns for The Jakarta Post – he also writes for the New Straits Times of Malaysia – remain highly respected. He is a liberal Muslim with nothing in common with the gimlet-eyed advocates of a literalist interpretation of Islam in Indonesia, and he has been a beacon of light. It was a profound privilege to meet him.