The Making of Politically Conscious Indonesian Teachers in Public Schools, 1930-42

Abstract

This paper deals with the emergence of political consciousness among Indonesian teachers and students in public Dutch-Indonesian teacher training schools (Hollands ( Inlandse Kweekschool, HIK) during the last colonial decade up to the beginning of the Japanese occupation in 1942. Most of the Indonesian teachers and students, who pursued careers and education respectively in government schools, had initially embarked from personal expectations of upward economic mobility. Yet, in the course of the 1930s, they grew in deliberate willingness and perception to engage in a wider scope of social dynamics without limiting themselves to the area of power politics. In this paper, the manner in which these students and teachers gave meaning to their daily lives inside and outside of school is identified and analyzed as the factor that critically contributed to the emergence of political consciousness among them. Although the transformation that the teachers underwent in their view of school education was a radical leap when seen from the perspective of the Indonesiacentric historiography of the 1930s, it did not actually show a process of transformative pedagogy. The sense of citizenship that the teachers shared in the 1930s, albeit a dramatic shift from the motivation that had originally propelled them, did not reflect the notion of public education as an independent practice of cultural upbringing irrelevant to the state and state-formation ideology.