Education Must Be Accessible For All Children, Pundit Says

Jakarta - Ratna Megawangi, an educational activist, believes the key to the successful education of children is to focus on nurturing all their talents and abilities, and criticizes the government for paying little attention to less academically able students.

“Even children with Down syndrome have trainable motor skills. Life is so much more than just academics,” she said in a statement sent to The Jakarta Post recently.

The founder of the Indonesian Heritage Foundation (IHF), an NGO that has pioneered holistic education in the country, said the government should reflect on the country`s education policy, which needs to prepare children for the fast-changing world instead of focusing on winning medals in academic competitions.

“We should ask ourselves; if we want to focus on getting medals, the strategy should be to focus on teaching the most intelligent people, who only account for 0.01 percent of the population,” she said.

Ratna claimed students who were successful at academically oriented schools had an Intelligent Quotient (IQ) score of more than 115 but made up only 15 percent of the population.

“But how about the bottom 85 percent or 99 percent of children?” she asked.

She said the government had to identify what kinds of skills were needed to give the country a sustainable advantage.

While there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the ambition of collecting prestigious academic medals, she questioned the benefit of focusing on that when the majority of people, in terms of creativity, work ethic, entrepreneurial spirit and character, were still behind other countries.

“The rigidity of the industrial era will be replaced by flexibility and quick decision-making based on easy information access.

“Therefore, the educational system should be replaced by a system that would give students the opportunity to be more creative, critical, communicative, flexible, tolerant, caring and adept at problem solving,” she said.

As an example, she cited an educational strategy in Japan that focused on educating the 50 percent of people who had lower IQ levels in order to have skilled people to process the newly invented technology in the 1980s.

Ratna said Japan adopted the strategy because they did not want to compete with the United States, which focused on the education of the most intelligent 25 percent of the labor force, in terms of inventing new products.

In 2001, Ratna established the Character School; catering for children from kindergarten up to the eighth grade.

Ratna supports more than 100 nonprofit makeshift character schools in the city`s less-developed areas, with the Character School supplying teachers willing to spend time with the children for a small stipend. Indah Setiawati

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com
Photo: http://www.beritajakarta.com

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