sit-down flushing toilets, usually with a sort of squirting hose contraption in lieu of toilet paper—you’ll get used to it!
I’ve been an anak kos (“lodger”, literally “boarding house kid”)—a couple of times—and they were great places, full of that unmistakable Indonesian social warmth. It’s almost impossible to find a house for a short-term lease in Indonesia, but your board in a rumah kos is paid by the month. For economic or educational migrants from poor backgrounds a budget rumah kos is the only affordable accommodation option, but around the swanky private universities in major Indonesian cities you’ll find rumah kos complete with swimming pools and monthly rent that runs into the hundreds of dollars. The main attraction of these places is the chance to live communally, to find a home away from home—because in Indonesia a house without other people in it is no home!
Floor-level seating, tea, snacks and cigarettes—the essential elements of hospitality in a traditional home.
Helping Hands: The Pembantu
“You have a maid???” exclaim my British friends when I’m living in Indonesia. “You don’t have a maid???” exclaim my Indonesian friends when I’m living in the UK…
Having live-in domestic staff is as much a middle class necessity in Indonesia as having a television. I’ve met Indonesians who simply can’t comprehend that while I was growing up my parents—a teacher and a journalist—not only didn’t have a maid; they couldn’t possibly have afforded one. “But who did the housework?” they ask, aghast, and when I tell them they’re still more incredulous: “Your dad???” Wages for domestic staff are very low in Indonesia (the attraction for young women from poor rural backgrounds is that with room and board provided you can, in theory, save everything you earn), so even families on relatively modest incomes can often afford at least one maid. Those with more cash to spare might have a whole gang of them.
The Indonesian word for maid is pembantu, which literally means “helper”—a somewhat softer concept than “servant”—and in many middle class households the pembantu is almost a member of the family.
A THIRST FOR LEARNING, BUT AN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM THAT OFTEN FALLS SHORT
It’s an image that defines the Indonesian morning. From straggling villages on far-flung islets to classy suburban compounds, the roads are alive with noisy chatter of 55 million children heading for school. They go in early—usually at 7.30am—and they’re generally done by early afternoon when the flow reverses, the same neatly uniformed horde fanning out towards food stalls, hang-out spots, and homes.
Heads down! Struggling through the dreaded Ujian Nasional.
All Indonesians are supposed to go through 12 years of compulsory schooling. From the ages of six to 11 children attend Sekolah Dasar, Elementary School, usually abbreviated to SD. Kids in SD wear white and brick-red uniforms, and they definitely set the color scheme of the Indonesian streets first thing in the morning. After that it’s on to Sekolah Menengah Pertama or SMP, Junior High School, for three years. The uniform for SMP is usually white and navy blue. And then there’s three final years of Sekolah Menengah Atas, SMA, Senior High School, where the students wear white and slate-blue. The school year starts in mid-July, with a break in December and another break wherever the end of Ramadan (defined by the lunar calendar) happens to fall.
Remarkably, for such a vast country with a great deal of inequality, Indonesia manages very nearly 100 percent enrollment at Elementary School level. And Indonesia also manages near-universal literacy, with no meaningful disparity between male and female literacy rates. But if that all makes it sound like an educational Eden, you might, unfortunately, have to think again.
Indonesia routinely scores appallingly in international assessments of skills amongst school children. It’s a conundrum fit to make you grind your teeth: how can a country with a universal schooling system and total basic literacy do so badly? But you don’t need to go very far beyond the school gates to start finding problems. For a start, Indonesian education puts an old-fashioned emphasis on rote learning and memorization of meaningless information. When I was teaching English in a private language center it often seemed that my main job was undoing all the damage done in state schools, where kids were drilled in convoluted formal grammar by teachers who could barely speak English themselves.
Secondly, on paper Indonesia might have one of the best teacher-to-pupil ratios on the planet (in fact, several critical World Bank reports have actually claimed that Indonesia has too many teachers), but that doesn’t always match the reality on the ground. The country’s three million teachers are mostly poorly trained, poorly paid, and poorly disciplined. They’re also more likely to play truant than the kids.
Senior high school girls hanging out after class in Bali.
Not long ago I was sitting waiting for a ferry on a small island in eastern Indonesia. The Independence Day celebrations of 17 August were just a few weeks off, and group after group of schoolkids—some of them nothing more than first-graders—came marching past in perfect formation, diligently practicing their parts in the upcoming celebratory parades, and without an adult in sight. I asked one of the older children what was going on; their teachers hadn’t turned up that morning, so they’d organized themselves!
TESTING TIMES
As the month of April looms, Indonesian kids start getting decidedly twitchy at the approach of the dreaded Ujian Nasional, the national tests sat at the end of each of the three stages of the schooling system. These exams—which are basically tests of memorization rather than applied learning—put a huge amount of pressure on students. Until recently you had to pass to graduate to the next level of schooling, and the shame of failure was awful. But the weird thing is that each year the national pass rates for the Ujian Nasional are so close to 100 percent that I always find myself wondering exactly how the unfortunate 0.5 percent have actually managed to fail. The problem, of course, is institutionalized cheating on a quite spectacular scale—often with the collusion of teachers who are as terrified of poor results as the kids.
There are those who are trying to improve the education system. When President Joko Widodo was elected in 2014, he handed command of the Culture and Education Ministry to experienced educationalist Anies Baswedan, who set out on a program of reform (his progressive reputation was later tainted by his victory in a dirty fight for the Jakarta governorship). But it’ll be a long time before all the problems are ironed out. One of the unfortunate upshots of this is that those with cash to burn take their children out of the system altogether—sending them to privately run international schools at home or abroad, and then packing them off for university education overseas. This is creating a tiny youthful elite, speaking fluent English with an American twang and enjoying an outlook that places them poles apart from even the smartest of their stay-at-home compatriots.
University students in class.
STUDENT LIFE
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