Educational Issues in Indonesia, The Newest Curriculum

Knowledge is one of the most important things for everyone. Furthermore, a good behavior is also one of the factors. Knowledge and good behavior lead people to reach a bright future, everyone must want it. Bright future brings pride, happiness, satisfaction, richness, and it must be everyone's expectation. So, if many people can reach the bright future, it will also bring advantages to their country. The larger number of successful men a country has, the better it will be. Without knowledge and good behavior, people won't get any closer to the bright future and so does the country, it will never be better, it will be even worse. To prevent this case, every goverment in each country always struggles to produce smart, clever, good, and bright societies. They always try to make a new educational program, in order to refresh the educational things in their country according to world's development.

The most refreshed one in Indonesia is the changes of the curriculum for elementary until high school students. Curriculum is the courses that applied in teaching and learning activity in an educational institution. Curriculum sets all about the educational activity. The newest curriculum in Indonesia is called Curriculum 2013.

Curriculum 2013, the newest curriculum of national education of Indonesia, will make a lot of changes to the face of education system of this archipelago country. For all stages of educational institutions, from  elementary school to senior high school, numerous lessons will be dismissed. Started from this coming academic year (2013/2014), the changes made will be on the process of learning, the number of lessons, and also the learning time will be longer than before. As the impact of those spreading issues about this new curriculum, some people think that the curriculum 2013 will cause more unemployed; arising a new folly due to the abolition of vital lessons. Therefore, this curriculum causes pros and cons.

The difference between Curriculum 2013 and the Education Unit Level Curriculum are located on the competence aspect of knowledge. Curriculum 2013 puts attitude on the higher priority than skill competencies and knowledge. So, it says that English, Social Science, and Science subject will be removed from the subject list for elementary school; Social Science and Science will be intergrated in other subjects, such as Indonesian Language etc, whereas English can be learned as an extracurricular subject. I wonder if the government forgets that for reaching the bright future good attitude must be accompanied by knowledge. Moreover, those subjects are very important for chidren's developments. English is the international language, Social science teaches children how to socialize others, Science tell them about their own nature. I can't imagined how it will be if 6 years in elementary school are wasted without learning about those three important subjects completely.

In junior high school, it says that the students have to be taught more lessons in Math and Science than the last curriculum and the information and communication technology will be removed because they think this subject is a medium for learning other subjects.

And as we know, in the last curriculum the students have to determine the major that they want to take in the second grade of senior high school, but in this new curriculum, they have to do it in the first grade of senior high school. Equal to the system for junior high school, senior high school will also lose the information and communication technology as one of the subjects.

Not only the students, the teacher have not been ready for this new curriculum either, almost of them even have not known what the curriculum 2013 contains. They also need preparations, trainings, and whatever needed to be able to teach well in this new curriculum and certified teachers of Science, Social Science and other removed subjects are worrying about their continuation job.

But, behind all those weaknesses in our opinions that are brought by this new curriculum, I think Indonesia's governments have strong reasons for this plannings. So, what a good idea if they will tell us about the clarities.