of 1927,23 the Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi, which in my time was the sole teaching academy for the whole of Sumatra, was closed altogether.24 Even the Kweekschool was too advanced for the ten million Sumatran people, and for the Minangkabau people in particular.
Here I have not the time, space, or inclination to relate the whole story of my education, useful as it might be for our youth today. But in order to explain more clearly how the climate and food of the Netherlands disagreed with me, particularly in my early years there, it will help if I explain in some detail the conflict between the knowledge I had at the time and my desire to study on the one hand, and between this desire and the possibilities for me to realize it on the other.
The Dutch government paid the cost of education for the pupils at the Rijkskweekschool in Haarlem, just as it did at the Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi. But other similarities between the two schools were hard to find. The Rijkskweekschool in Haarlem taught its students to become teachers of Dutch children in the Dutch language and in the interests of the Dutch nation. The Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi trained its students to teach Indonesian children, primarily in the Indonesian language and in the interests of the Dutch East Indies.
Competition to receive government support was so great that many of the students admitted to the Rijkskweekschool were at least graduates of the MULO level.25 The large number of candidates meant that the entrance examinations were hard enough, though not as harsh as those for the Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi, particularly for students of Minangkabau-darat or Padang-darat descent.26 (In my time, of the two or three hundred candidates only three of us were accepted.)
[25] When I started at the Rijkskweekschool in Haarlem, I was bitterly disappointed to find that my education from the Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi had no connection with what I would now pursue. It is true that both schools taught botany, for example. However, the plants we had to study in the Netherlands were of course different from those in Indonesia: similarly with geography, pedagogy, art, and geometry. Furthermore, there were subjects that I had to study from the very beginning, such as Dutch history, world history, algebra, stereometry, trigonometry, and mechanics. On the other hand, some of the subjects that I had studied in Bukit Tinggi, such as chemistry and agriculture, were not taught at all or were taught only minimally. But the first and foremost subject for a Dutch teacher was the Dutch language, and, however clever one might be in studying foreign languages, Dutch youths of fourteen to twenty years of age naturally understood their mother tongue better than an Indonesian who had only studied Dutch several hours a day in school for six years. But that did not mean that I could not beat the students in even the highest class in grammar.
I do not know what strategy the teachers at the Rijkskweekschool had decided to use on me, but over those two years I had no class of my own and was shifted around among the four classes. For geography, for instance, in the morning I might be in class one and in the afternoon in class four. In itself, without any other problems, this would have been enough to break the heart of anyone who was studying subjects from the very beginning. Certainly I had to force myself to study all my subjects. Those like pedagogy and botany required self-discipline, and I had to be forced to study the exact sciences such as algebra and trigonometry.
Aside from arithmetic, one didn’t really need to study the exact sciences, either to be an ordinary teacher or for the examination to qualify as head teacher. But after the mathematics teacher shifted me around between classes one, two, and three in a single day, he pulled me aside during the break, saying he wanted to finish the mathematics lesson with me. He added in a whisper that he wanted to continue to teach me, though previously he had considered Indonesians incapable of learning mathematics. “It was really hard for me to teach Sutan,” he said, “but now, after seeing you, my outlook is changing.”
[26] I know that Sutan Casajangan, to whom he was referring, was certainly not stupid, even though he had failed five times in the examination for the head teacher’s certificate.27 My respect for the mathematical ability of the Bataks at the Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi was very high, and Sutan Casajangan, a former pupil at that school who had been accepted through examinations from among the many candidates from Tapanuli, certainly was no exception.28 But probably a weakness in his knowledge of the Dutch language made it difficult for him to understand the mathematics he was taught. And as for his having failed the head teacher’s exam five times, it was quite possible that the Dutch imperialist school policy had something to do with it.
Mathematics had never been a problem for me, even when I was constantly moved around from one lesson to another. Several years before I arrived in the Netherlands I had already worked out a strategy for understanding mathematics, and I was able to apply it successfully without working very hard. But as for studying plants—the number of leaves and stamens and seeds—or the number of teeth of a Dutch frog or the way to teach the alphabet to children, there was no alternative to rote learning, and I was not cut out for that. I really hated to learn by rote, except when I had a real interest in something.
My hatred for memorization was even greater than my hatred of facing bread and cheese and bread and cheese without variation, day after day in the hostel. My hatred of these foods was aroused simply by the sight of them, but my hatred of forced learning by rote was unceasing, as was my hatred of the unjust differences between Indonesian and Dutch societies.
It was under such conditions that I had the opportunity of meeting the late Professor Snouck Hurgronje, who said to me, “I wouldn’t even think of becoming a teacher of German children though I have lived a long time in Germany and really know the German language well.” I was surprised to hear this. Then he asked at what age I had started to learn Dutch. I answered that I had studied it since I was about thirteen. He then said, “So before you were thirteen you didn’t have any contact with Dutch children. Do you think, then, that you can understand the spirit of Dutch children under the age of thirteen in the primary school, and use the words they use?”
[27] It was with my thoughts in tumult that I left the professor, who was known as an ethisch,29 an admirer of the inlanders [natives]30 and an expert on Islam. His question still thundered in my ears, and it was from that time that I began to doubt the direction of my education. I was ashamed of wanting to attain the right to become a teacher of Dutch children with whom I shared neither language nor nation, and whose spirits I would be unable to reach in their mother tongue.
At first, I thought of changing my field of study but here I collided with the advice that my teacher, Horensma, had given me before we parted. Several times he said to me that he could only advise me to become a teacher. I knew it was because he was a teacher himself and because he wanted to see an Indonesian receive the education of a Dutch teacher. Only after I had returned to Bukit Tinggi six years later, and he himself had become disillusioned with the bureaucracy in Batavia, did he express his regret over that advice. “I really should have advised you to become an engineer.”31 If from the start my education had been directed toward chemical or agricultural engineering, and if my health had been guarded, my desire to study would not have been disturbed and might even have been encouraged. But, anyway, as the proverb goes, the rice had already turned to porridge, and in those six years I underwent many changes.32
When one’s body suffers through want and one’s spirit is shackled, when all roads to change and improvement are blocked, then one’s heart is open, torn between the emotions of the common fate of humanity and the realization of social contradiction, between negative and positive forces. The turbulence of thesis and antithesis within me was a reflection of the external struggle taking place about me: in the typical poor household in which I lived and as an echo of the broader struggle throughout Europe, which together with the whole world was caught in the crucible of the First World War. It was almost a year before the war began when I arrived in the Netherlands and nearly a year after it ended when I left.
[28] I lived in a small, dark attic room in the rented house of a working class family, a small
