The Problems of Teachers in Indonesian Education

The Problems of Teachers in Indonesia Education
Many people in my country believe that education is a valuable asset for him or her. So they agree that education has recently become the best investment for their future, because with higher education, they will be honored in the community, increase their self confidence, have a wide network and it will be easy to get a job. For example, someone who graduated from higher education will easily to accept in a private company or government agencies and get better salaries compared to someone who only graduated from primary school. Therefore, most parents try to look for the quality schools for their child with the expectation if they will have been passing grade from high school or university, he or she will be the best man or woman. In my point of view, that education is not only concerned with the results that have been achieved. At the simple language, there is a change of cannot be able to able or from not understanding to understanding. But the most important in education is the interaction process between all the components that occurred during the learning process; it 's between the teacher and student and all stakeholders, who had the responsibility to create a high quality education. At this point, I appreciate, if the teacher has the important role in the education process. However, there are many problems of our teachers in Indonesia.
Unfortunately, the condition of the teacher in my hometown is a predicament. Anis Baswedan, Rector of Paramdina University, said “The teachers is spearheading education problem in Indonesia, since education is a process of human interaction. If we pay attention to quality, distribution and welfare of teachers, I think we can resolve some of the problems of education in Indonesia” (qtd. Wineto, par. 2). I assent that the primary point of the issue of teachers in Indonesia is the quality of teachers. It can be proved, for example, when I was in high school some of the teachers had not graduated from college, but taught in class and they were not teaching in their disciplines. Consequently, sometimes we were not understanding what they said and ineffective learning process running out of our expectation. In his essay “ We Should Cherish Our Children’s Freedom to Think” Kie Ho expresses, based on his experience when he was in high school that the learning process in Indonesia is like a dedication and obedience (p. 113). I conclude that the teachers do like this because their quality is lower thus they cannot arrange the class better.
I underline the second problem of the teachers in Indonesia is the unequal distribution of teachers at school between urban areas and rural areas especially in remote areas and small islands. No doubt, that my country is the biggest country in the world with the thousand islands and it is dominated by small islands. The distance from one island to another is so far and sometimes the teacher needs more effort to go to school. I cannot imagine, when I have found one high school in a rural area in my hometown, that the total number of teachers, who teach in this school was only two people. I think, it is a dilemma. How to improve our education quality if we are lack the teacher. On the other hand, I observed that almost every year many teachers have graduated from various universities, but they really like to teach in the capital city better than in remote areas and small island.
Furthermore, I recognize the lowest welfare of our teachers is the third problem. Thus why they sometimes did not come to school. However, they have been receiving appropriate and adequate income, including basic salary, allowances attached to the salary, and special allowances and other income related to the job. But for them, this income is not enough to balance their expenses every month. This condition led the teachers do a side job. As long as I know, several of them teach again in another school or tutor in the afternoon even be a taxi driver or trade and so on. I truly believe if this situation moves on continuously, the teacher never focuses on learning processes. They cannot enhance the teaching method in the class and the students ' quality will be lower. At the end, the student would not be good.
I have to agree with Anis Baswedan, when he said, that the government should pay attention to boost the allocated budget to improve education quality access and equity in education services (qtd. Wineto, par. 3). I hope if this money was allocated for this purpose, the government has an ability to strengthen the quality of teaching and increase the teacher welfare. Furthermore, I am convinced, there are many available scholarships for all teachers to continue their studies or internships to higher education in Indonesia or abroad.
Moreover, I prefer to think that the government can also collaborate with the private sector and the public in order to give the same responsibility to provide excellent education facility, and contribution to looking up the human resources particularly the teacher quality and students. There are many programs that they can arrange with private companies. For an instance, do the internship work for the teachers at their institute, sending the teachers to attend some short course, training and so on.
In general, the problems in our education system are complicated. But I believe, when all of the stakeholders (government, private sector and public) should be working together, construct the best planning as well as evaluation system, and also increase the budget in education to solve the problem such as unequal teacher distribution, teacher welfare and access to school in remote areas and small islands. Thus the problem can the end and we can make over the education quality to get better.

Works Cited
Ho, Kie. “We Should Cherish Our Children’s Freedom to Think”. In Guidelines: A Cross-Cultural Reading/Writing Text. 3rd Ed. Ruth Spack. NY: Cambridge, 2012. 112-114. Print.
Wineto. “Peranan Guru, Solusi Masalah Pendidikan di Indonesia.” 29 Mei 2013: 13 september 2013

Cited: Ho, Kie. “We Should Cherish Our Children’s Freedom to Think”. In Guidelines: A Cross-Cultural Reading/Writing Text. 3rd Ed. Ruth Spack. NY: Cambridge, 2012. 112-114. Print. Wineto. “Peranan Guru, Solusi Masalah Pendidikan di Indonesia.” 29 Mei 2013: 13 september 2013