Learning and Knowing Boundaries: Schooling in New Order Indonesia

Abstract

Schooling practices in Indonesia take place within a centrally structured educational bureaucracy. The paper focuses on primary and secondary schools, which have undergone rapid expansion since the oil boom of the early 1 980s. Taking school examinations as sociological objects of study, there is an attempt to understand the students' mental processes as they prepare for these determinative events. Every question in every subject has a correct answer within each sector of schooling through nationally legitimated curricula. Teachers and pupils know that schools are places where one learns by heart the requisite texts, whether they be in Mathematics, Bahasa Indonesia, Morals of Pancasila, or History. Whether students perceive the process as a game or reality, one result is the numbing (or perhaps multi-layering) of creative young minds - at least during the time that the children are in school. Another result is the (often unconscious) learning of boundaries. The theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu is used in the analysis. To forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again; and above all to apply the same process to the process itself That was the ultimate subtlety. Even to understand the word doublethink involved the use of doublethink. Orwell (1949, p. 31) In examining the way in which knowing or knowledges are constructed in schools in Indonesia, one needs an understanding of the schooling structures, practices, and beliefs in Indonesia, and also a knowledge of the sociology of education. This paper brings together those two facets with the aim of understanding the period of the New Order, so that future educational policy decisions may be made with some sense of awareness of past practices and more openness.