Pesta Blogger 2009

I dedicate this writing to Pesta Blogger 2009, an event I just missed. It took place yesterday (Oct 24, 2009) and sadly it was in Jakarta, which is much too far away from where I live. However, my absence in the event doesn't stop me writing something about this lovely festivity. 

I browsed the web with mind full of curiosity what was happening at SMESCO building Jakarta where it  happened, and stumbled upon news about Tifatul Sembiring. If I may remind you all, he was the top leader of PKS (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera) who is now appointed the minister of communication and informatics in the new cabinet formed by the commander in chief SBY. 

Anies Baswedan: A Young Rector with Liberated Mind (part1)

If this is the first time you hear the name 'Anies Baswedan', it might be assumed that you're not quite familiar with Indonesian academic world. This very man is absolutely one of the remarkable figures in the country. 
Farhan the famous TV presenter got him on the show  "Tatap Muka" and interviewed him on his campus, the University of Paramadina. They were talking about some worthnoting issues this nation is dealing with now.

The Return of Indonesia: Some Drawbacks and Steps towards Being a Developed Country

INDEF's economist Aviliani highlighted the vital role education plays in bringing this nation to a brighter future. She complained about the fact that there is no harmony found between the education and market design. Educational institutions fail to respond well to current market demands, and it leads to the rising number of unemployment in the domestic area.

Another opinion about Indonesia's human resource quality was given by C. Harinowa, who was a former IMF executive director. He elaborated some facts that some Indonesians are doing pretty well at work, especially at international level. He witnessed a number of Indonesians holding strategic posts of a  profitable multinational company, Unilever. It does show us Indonesians are not really as unqualified as we thought before.

Commenting after Harinowa was a former BNI director named Sutan Remy. Remy articulated his objection to the dominant role of foreign banks in Indonesia nowadays. Privatization is not something to avoid but we definitely must remain to be the man in charge in our own national bankings. He suggested that Bank Indonesia be as procative as possible. What is meant by 'proactive ' is that BI should be actively offering loans to less fortunate micro businesses. Credit portfolio policy is also an issue to reconsider here.

The discussion was wrapped with some fervent exchanges of ideas done by the invited experts, pertaining to steps to take to advance Indonesia. Mari Elka Pangestu, the Indonesian minister of commerce, elaborated that infrastructures and facilities must be provided evenly throughout the country, the human resource quality is to be improved, bureaucracy reform is inevitable to avoid high cost economy, domestic market is potential for creative industry such as movie industry and book writing. The last point she had was that this nation must learn how to appreciate its own domestic products.

The other commentator being asked for his opinion was Komarudin Hidayat. Basically, he emphasized the Indonesians' mindset reform, urgent need of a grand strategy which involves all the nation's elements, deciding the development priority scale and focus (what sector comes first and mainly concentrate on it), and drawback inventorying (deleting some unnecessary laws, blocking policies , unfriendly work ethics).

Govt to attract students to natural sciences

With fewer and fewer people taking university degrees in the natural sciences, the national Education Ministry is working on ways to attract more students.

“High school graduates today are not interested in studying agriculture, animal husbandry or fishery; these majors are not popular anymore,” a senior official at the Education Ministry, Hendarman, told a discussion recently.

Some universities, he added, had even had to close their agriculture courses because not a single student wanted to take them.

The phenomenon, he said, was ironic, considering Indonesia was an agricultural country.

Academic director at the directorate general of higher education, Illah Sailah, said Monday the declining trend in people applying to major in the natural sciences had actually started in 2004.

“It will be our country’s loss if no one studies these subjects. Who will manage our natural resources then?” she said.

To address the problem, the ministry is looking at ways to attract more students to study agriculture.

“Perhaps by changing the name of the subject into something more interesting,” Hendarman said, adding that “agribusiness classes” have more participants, although they are not that different from agriculture classes.

Soil Science, Agriculture, Cultivation, and Pest and Disease majors are merged into the category of agrotechnology while Agriculture, Social Economics, and Communication and Counselingclasses are combined into the agribusiness course.

“By doing this, we aim to achieve different learning outcomes; we want graduates with general skills that are comprehensive, and not the specific skills regular agriculture classes offer now,” Illah told The Jakarta Post.

“Besides, industry requires graduates to have the skills to manage everything, from upstream to downstream, so we are trying to respond to the market’s signals,” she said.

Hendarman said a lot of agriculture or fishery graduates do not work in their specific fields of knowledge.

“Rather, most of them are now working as employees in banks, or as journalists, or in other fields,” he said, adding that Indonesia still has a high unemployment rate.

The country is seeing an increase in the number of people who have university diplomas but are unemployed. In 2008 the number increased by 42 percent to 1 million compared with the figure for 2005. Illah said that the ministry was also revitalizing the agricultural courses. “We started giving grants to 29 universities this year so they can renew or add to their educational resources and equipment,” she said, adding that each university receives between Rp 400 million (US$40,400) to Rp 900 million. Rector of the University of Indonesia Gumilar Rusliwa Somantri said his university has also seen a decline in the number of applicants for natural science majors, however he had another way to attract students. “We try to entice them by offering scholarship opportunities,” he said, without going into detail as to the number of scholars the university had accepted(source: the Jakarta Post)

THE RETURN OF INDONESIA: ARE WE READY ENOUGH TO BE THE NEXT DEVELOPED COUNTRY IN THE WORLD?(PART 2)

NATION'S LITERACY IGNORED?

Indonesian celebrated poet, Mr. Taufik Ismail, pointed out the other vital issue this nation is encountering. Ismail regretted the government's feeble and wavering political will to strengthen Indonesian young generation literacy level. Most Indonesian students are now losing their ability to write as they are seldom exposed to reading activity. Ismail surprisingly compared our current literature way of teaching to the one that we adopted during the Dutch Collonialism era. At that time, Ismail went on, students were required to read more literary works and then to write compositions related to the works they just read.

The moderator reasoned this must be caused by Indonesian tendency to be an oral-cultured nation. The reason, however, was instantly rebutted by Ismail by stating that our literacy during Dutch colonialization was even better than now.

Ismail also lamented the government's complete ignorance towards the development of literature publication in Indonesia. Indonesian one and only literature magazine is now trying hard to survive but the government isn't even aware of that..

SCHOOLS LEASH CREATIVITY?

Another amazing aspiring figure invited by Metro TV to the stage was Rheynald Kassali. He was eloquently conveying his message about Indonesian inappropriately-designed education system. Kassali stated that Indonesia is a big nation with leashed creativity. He gave an example that Indonesian children have no option but being controlled by the authority (parents, babysitters, teachers, etc). Schools and teachers give boundaries to their students. Similarly, the government also employs a set of curricula that seem inconsistent unfriendly to students.

To overcome this, Kassali suggested a massive and thorough  educational reform which involves the teachers quality improvement. The unsuitable teaching methods Indonesian teachers are using are allegedly to be the culprit.

Other than that, Kassali mentioned this nation should start to learn how to compete fairly. Thus far, Indonesians have been so much acquainted with solidarity values. Solidarity is above all, that's what they believe. What makes Indonesians fail to compete with other nations is that they tend to think  based on solidarity values, that togetherness is good, without exception. That's why we easily find a group of students cheating during exams. They're never told that some cases of togetherness/ solidarity are exceptionally destructive, unethical and improper.

HEALING THE POVERTY-RIDDEN NATION (part1)

One of my great teachers once said rescuing other people from poverty is a form of jihad, too. And I can't agree more. As we already witness, in most cases poverty has caused this nation lots of troubles. Poverty, to me, is the main cause of a series crime acts, terrorism, etc. Indonesia, like many other developing countries, is struggling to tackle tons of poverty-related issues. I'm not saying being richer solves all problems we have now, but at the very least this nation has reached a better level of develoment. In a nutshell, poverty may lead to a nation's deteriorating overall state.
I also heard a Javanese proverb or motto: "wareg, waras, wasis". I am Javanese myself and supposed to be familiar with this but I understood the wise words meaning for the first time when one of our vice presidential contenders, Wiranto, elaborated the meaning on a TV show. Wareg (literally means "stuffed/full (on stomach)"), as long as I can recall Wiranto's explanation, means humanbeings basically have to be satisfied in terms of their basic necessities (food, shelter, clothing, etc). This is the very fundamental crave everyone absolutely needs, including saints, prophets, or anyone. Waras means humankind would be able to be physically, mentally, psychologically and spiritually fit or healthy. Wasis means humans need to learn knowledge,enrich their well-being with more wisdom. Thus being a wasis man is the final stage where someone has to achieve during his or her lifetime.

TERRORISM PSYCHOLOGY (PART2): KNOWING WHAT AND HOW TO FIX

This is my second post discussing the same topic: terrorism psychology in Komarudin Hidayat’s perspective. There are some worth noting points that Hidayat had proposed to tackle the thriving terrorism on the land of Indonesia. And these are some thoughts I managed to summarize:
GIVING LESS SPACE
The short term measure the police and people take now is probably cooperating with each other to give the culprits less space of movement. With less space of movement, it’s going to be easier for us to catch and detain them. This, however, isn’t quite effective as terrorism is about mindset and thought. Mindset and thought are sometimes well-concealed and blur. We cannot easily detect which people are terrorists and which are not ones. Even they perish physically, as long as the wrongly-interpreted belief is widespread, it is not really surprising to see the younger version of them in the future.
CREATING COUNTER-IDEOLOGY
Somehow the government, along with people, should show that Indonesia is a mostly -moslem-populated country so it’s extremely ridiculous and doesn’t make sense at all for the terrorists to demolish the country where many moslems -their compatriots- live their life and earn a living. Hurting Indonesia necessarily means hurting moslems as a whole, and humanity as a whole.
DEVISING A MORE-HUMANE AND FRIENDLY APPROACHING METHOD
It is undeniable that terrorism is the result of extreme poverty, lack of education, marginalization. As we can see, most of Indonesian suicide bombers are some poorly educated people. Nana (one of the recent suicide bombers) came from a poverty-stricken village, he quit school at 6 grade and never continued to high school. Such kind of people is like a sitting duck for our culprits.
DECONSTRUCTING AND REBUILDING THE WAY OUR YOUNG GENERATIONS ARE TAUGHT
The nation’s awareness has to be rebuilt and revised as our education system seems to ignore a lot of essential matters and at the same time pay too much attention on other trivial issues. Hidayat took an example, it’s ridiculous too see how busy this nation builds intelligence by getting their students prepared for National Examination held annually for 6th graders of elementary schools, 9th graders and 12th graders of high schools, while they’re ignoring the importance of building the children’s characters. What is worse is that no public officials or eve our presidential contenders managed to reveal their awareness, attention and seriousness pertaining to the nation’s character building. Character building is fundamental, yet tragically overlooked.
Next, Hidayat criticized the education values that our students keep absorbing. To Hidayat, a huge number of school text books particularly the faith-related ones needs major revision. Hidayat gave our neighboring Singapore’s icon, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, as a typical example of the success of education system reform. We can see now, in spite of its size (compare to Indonesia), Singapore has become a developed country and reached many astounding progresses as a young Asian nation. Indonesia gained its independence years before Singapore did, but Indonesia is left behind. So, what’s wrong with Indonesia?
FINDING THE BEST CONDUCTOR
Hidayat emphasized the vital role of a conductor for a choir. This is such an apt analogy for us. The nation, Hidayat added, had been ready to move on, move forward, but the problem is who can lead this nation so they have a common set of vision, concept, commitment, and action?? We’re ready, we’re strong, but can this nation find a distingushed leader who meets the requirements?

THE RETURN OF INDONESIA: ARE WE READY ENOUGH TO BE THE NEXT DEVELOPED COUNTRY IN THE WORLD?(PART 1)

Indonesia is rich, yet poor. Indonesia is is smart, yet foolish. Indonesia is huge, but weak. Welcome to Indonesia, the land of contradictions.

What saddens me is the fact that there are many countries which gained their independence as long as or even later than Indonesia did, but nowadays they've already become so gigantic and influential in terms of economic, political, and any kinds of sectors. It seems that Indonesia is left far away behind. In this age of technology, Indonesia is like a snail trying to pursue other countries which seemingly can run like a young stallion.

Apart from that, I'm trying to be optimistic, at least for now as I'd love to see this nation reviving and regaining its glory in the past, when Gajahmada was uniting this vast archipelago.

Last night I watched some public officials, outstanding scholars, experienced leaders and reliable pundits of the country gathering to talk about the return of Indonesia. I think it's worth knowing to see how these people of authority speak up their mind bluntly on the future forecast of this 64-year-old country.

POTENTIALS

Marie Elka Pangestu initiated the discussion by stating the varied kinds of potentials Indonesia already has but are left unmanaged. Indonesia, as Pangestu went on, possesses abundant amount of valuable natural resources. Speaking of natural resources, she addressed the importance of managing and processing continually the resources. Another potential Indonesia has is the vast and large fields stretched throughout the country, which in turn may be a guarantee for the nation's food supply. Of human resources, there must be more and more creativity grown by devising better education methods for young generation. We need more creative people to become a better nation.

Meanwhile, besides the natural resources, Silmy Karim (HIMPI chairperson) highlighted the vital role of independence, meaning that Indonesian domestic products should be loved firstly by its local consumers. As he pointed out, there are a lot of Indonesian products imported and branded as the other countries' products. This shows the quality of Indonesian products is not as bad as we think. Karim also explained the huge number of population can be an advantage.

Another sight was provided by M. S. Hidayat, the chief of KADIN (Kamar Dagang Indonesia-Indonesian Chamber of Commerce). By the point of view of entrepreneurs he tried to represent, he abrasively stated how dumb this nation is. By exporting raw materials, we are letting the other nations enjoy the added value that we were supposed to be taking. Hidayat said raw materials export must be banned to stop this recurring tremendous loss of profits.

TERRORISM PSYCHOLOGY

The title sounds like a new discipline but this isn't. Couple of days ago I watched a talkshow called SAVE OUR NATION on Metro TV, viewing Prof. Komarudin Hidayat, one of the country's best moslem scholars ever. He elaborated how the root of terrorism grows in Indonesia, and above all he suggested to study the psychological state of those terrorism upholders.

RECRUITING YOUTHS THROUGH EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

It's hardly thinkable for most of us that terrorism uses this channel to survive and develop. Extracurricular activities high school or college students taking part in are allegedly to be the potential, effective "underground tunnel" for Noordin's and his partners to get new members.

The steps of recruitment, according to Hidayat, are inviting the potential youths to a group discussion, observing them, selecting the most potential one(s). They decide the most potential youngsters by scrutinzing their traits (usually young men with extreme stubborness, high intelligence and curiosity are chosen as the promising candidates). Soon after, these innocent young men are closely watched and observed, especially in terms of their personal life and problems. Disappointment, anger, feeling of being neglected may be destablizing their sensible minds and this is something terrorists are looking for. Hobbies and interests are some other way of attracting young people. Supplying them with what they want is a way to make them feel indebted to the recruiters. And the last step is convincing them that they have done uncounted sins which of course can't be redeemed by doing ordinary way of repenting. Simply said, the youths have to leave everything worldly to achieve the 'promised' heaven.

ROOTS OF TERROR

Hidayat emphazised the wrongly-designed Indonesian education system. These flaws in turn led this nation to being ignorant of any other equally or more vital issues. Hidayat took "ujian nasional" case as the typical example. Too much attention were given to design, train the students to pass the tests. One thing the authority completely forgot was that passing the exams didn't guarantee the students' character building. Our students are knowledgable but they're weak when it comes to dealing with their own personal issues, setting their goals to a better life, being completely blind to decide who they are or who they are going to be in the future, they have no life principles. In a nutshell, Indonesian students are wandering around, looking for the identity but what they don't know is that identity is primarily built by themselves, not by others. That's why we've had an teenaged suicide bomber recently.

HOW TO COUNTERACT TERRORISM

"Islam is destroyed mainly due to moslems, not by anyone or anything else", Hidayat added. Indonesia is the country where the biggest number of moslems are living, but why can terrorism thrive here? Thus, there must be something....no, many things wrong with our being moslems.

Moslems in Indonesia, in my opinion, pay too much attention on how to build Islamic symbols. Therefore, when it comes to worldly businesses, they seem to be less spirited. Most of Indonesian moslems know the meaning of "Kebersihan sebagian dari iman" but how many of us don't treat rivers as our gigantic sewage ditch where we can throw anything we want away? I recalled a story told by my pal, he told me he was going somewhere with his American friend, and guess what...they spotted some feeble elderly walking on sidewalk, wanting to cross the street. But the one who first initiated to help and get the elderly crossed was the American not my moslem Indonesian pal. Ironic but true! I think we are too much consumed by our prejudice that America or any western parts of this world is place where people are drinking liquor freely, having free sex or things like that.

They forget there are western people who like to help, think behave or act in a way a moslem is supposed to have. Like what I said, we preached too often about the importance of cleanliness but anyone can see how dirty Ciliwung is, how miserable our waste treatment is.

As moslems, we must admit that some foreign, western cultural values are good and worth adopting. It is highly possible that we can be adopting some of their values without losing our faith.

I think it's the time for moslems to review themselves, what to improve, fix and discard.