Interrogating identity: the International Standard School in Indonesia

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of the International Standard School (ISS) on the identity of Indonesia as a postcolonial nation. According to the Indonesian Ministry of National Education, an ISS is ‘a school which complies with the National Standard of Education and enriches its standards from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries’. While the ISS policy aims to address the internal demand of national education, it also responds to global pressures. Observed from a global perspective, because Indonesia is positioned as an importer of international standards, the ISS policy in turn relegates the nation to the margin of globalisation. Therefore, the nation’s identity – the nation’s position and positionality in global policy discourse – is challenged. Identity matters for postcolonial nations as it helps identify internal and external demands, specifically for policy-making purposes. Postcolonial perspectives are thus employed here, not only because the subject central to this paper is a postcolonial nation; but also because postcolonial theory offers theoretical frameworks to interrogate the global policy discourse.