“Bila kaum muda yang telah belajar di sekolah dan menganggap dirinya terlalu tinggi dan pintar untuk melebur dengan masyarakat yang bekerja dengan cangkul dan hanya memiliki cita-cita yang sederhana, maka lebih baik pendidikan itu tidak diberikan sama sekali.”
— Tan Malaka
How will Indonesia celebrate its 100th anniversary?
Indonesia’s Vice President Gibran Rakabuming Raka notes that several things must happen to achieve the Golden Indonesia 2045 Vision. One is leveraging technology, such as artificial intelligence, and taking advantage of the demographic bonus. To quote the VP himself:
Humans who do not use AI will be defeated by humans who use AI.
The government will implement the first stage, consisting of 16000 schools, for the new AI-backed curriculum.
But the question remains the same:
Is this going to work? Is this the right way to approach this problem?
In the next few paragraphs, we will trace back the problem of managing talent in developing countries, particularly the case of educated labor. We will see how choosing highly paid skills requires a trade-off in terms of policies, how democratizing education requires a different approach, and how the relationship between job requirements and education level is not linear at all.
As noted by Agus Suwignyo in his book Pendidikan dan Pelibatan Politik, without an in-depth knowledge of our previous attempts at the same problem, we are bound to go in circles and keep reinventing the wheel.
Let’s take a tour, shall we?
What To Focus On?
Crafting a skills‐development strategy in emerging economies means making tough choices about where to invest effort. There isn’t enough capacity to build every skill at once, and not every training program delivers the same payoff. As Lall puts it, “to support these specialized industries and technologies, it was necessary to have very focused investments in tertiary and training provision to provide the human infrastructure necessary to support them”. In other words, governments must pick the most critical skill areas and accept that other fields may lag behind.
Relying solely on market forces to sort out these priorities would have been too slow. Ashton et al. warn that if these countries “had relied on the market to perform [skill‐upgrading], there was a real danger that skill shortages would have been created… This is a slow process which took generations to work through in the West. These political leaders did not have that amount of time”. The trade‐off was clear: they traded some market efficiency for rapid, state‐led targeting of training.
But focusing training on a narrower set of skills brought its headaches. As economies shifted toward “higher value‐added goods and services,” employers needed not just specialized technical expertise but also “workers with high levels of general education and skills in team‐working and problem solving in addition to specific technical skills”. This meant that some groups inevitably received less attention.
One of the sharpest trade‐offs was between vocational and academic tracks. In South Korea, despite strong efforts “to steer students into vocational high schools, the government’s goal of two‐thirds of pupils in vocational high schools was never reached,” and eventually authorities “opened up the flood gates to university entrance, but still sought to control its output by establishing new technological universities”. Here, the state balanced its need for skilled technicians against families’ and youths’ desire for university credentials, often compromising on both sides.
Underlying all of these choices is the capacity and resolve of national institutions. As Ashton et al. argue, “as long as [governments’] motivation … to develop their education and training systems strategically as a lever for economic growth, and the mechanisms for doing so, remain stronger in the Tiger economies than in the West, they are likely to derive a measure of dynamic national competitive advantage in the global economy”. Sustaining that strategic focus, and living with the hard trade‐offs it demands, remains the central challenge for developing nations aiming to build the right skills at the right pace.
How did Indonesia develop its citizens?
Building on the example of the Asian Tigers, where Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea invested heavily in equipping their citizens with the technical and organizational skills needed for rapid industrial growth, we can see a parallel, if politically and ideologically inverted, effort by the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) to introduce modernity at the grassroots. While the Tigers’ motivation was economic development, the PKI’s motive was revolutionary transformation. As Ruth McVey observes,
“Moreover, it was not simply a matter of preaching the good word: people had to be brought to see in concrete ways how Marxism-Leninism would enable them to gain control over their circumstances, and how, therefore, it was the answer to the nation’s predicament. The key to this—communism’s essence, so far as this generation of PKI leaders was concerned—was modern organization, and the party’s principal task was to teach Indonesians how to think and arrange their action in a modern, organized, that is Marxist-Leninist way.”
Fighting Illiteracy: PBH and the People’s University
Recognizing that illiteracy was the most basic barrier to organization, the PKI launched an anti-illiteracy campaign, Pemberantasan Buta-Huruf (PBH), in 1957. Local PBH groups formed under elected “teacher-leaders,” who wove political slogans into lessons (“A” for Aidit, “T” for tanah untuk kaum tani) to introduce a Marxist-Leninist vocabulary while teaching the alphabet. As cadres grew more literate, complex ideas could be discussed, but the PKI soon realized that ideology alone would not build a movement.
To provide a more comprehensive educational structure, in late 1958, the PKI established the People’s University (Universitas Rakjat, Unra). Modeled on the Dutch volksuniversiteit system, Unra initially required entrants to have completed primary schooling and catered mostly to lower-level civil servants and PKI activists rather than the rural poor. Courses met three times weekly over two years, covering politics, economics, history, languages, and bookkeeping, but they suffered from low completion rates, insufficient teaching staff (often just six or seven overgrown cadres), scarce facilities, and a lack of teaching materials. By 1961, Unra’s drop-out rates forced a full review.
Unra Gaja Baru and the “New Man” Vision
In July 1963, D. N. Aidit relaunched Unra as Unra Gaja Baru, reorganized into three tiers, Panpera (basic), Bapera (junior high), and Mipera (senior high), and, for the first time, explicitly targeted common folk in villages. Literacy campaigns were timed to the harvest season, using “many teachers, few pupils, modest equipment, and concentrated instruction” to bring reading and writing to hundreds of thousands within two months. Panpera classes under trees or in ordinary houses introduced both basic academics and revolutionary culture, while Bapera and Mipera expanded into more formal campuses.
Aidit framed this effort as a cultural revolution:
“The Indonesian citizen of the future had to be a new man culturally, for only through a profound civilization transformation would he be able to overcome the country’s problems.”
The goal was not merely literacy, but to acculturate students to think dialectically through the lens of historical materialism and to see organization itself as the basis of power.
Ground-Level Research and Democratizing Knowledge
Simultaneously, the PKI recognized that an effective agrarian strategy required knowing rural realities firsthand. At its Sixth Congress in 1959, the party called for research into “feudal” exploitation in villages; cadres surveyed Kediri, Surabaya, Ngawi, Cilacap, Klaten, Pekalongan, Cirebon, and Bandung, but found these deep studies too slow and abstract. The Seventh Congress in 1962 instead mandated focused studies on landlord–peasant relations to support campaigns for rent reduction, wage increases, and realistic tenancy reforms.
In early 1964, Aidit personally led six-week teams of academics, students, and cadre researchers across dozens of kecamatan, living with ordinary peasants to avoid biased village-head reports. The resulting grassroots surveys, often scribbled on scraps of paper, demonstrated genuine analytical ability among minimally schooled villagers and surprised even seasoned scholars when, after the coup, these reports were unearthed in the PKI archives.
By teaching peasants to see their surroundings in terms of classes and interests and to believe that analysis and organization would bring understanding and improvement, the PKI democratized both political and social science. This campaign, like the earlier Taman Siswa schools and Muhammadiyah initiatives, sought to empower ordinary Indonesians, ultimately aiming to forge not just literate citizens but revolutionary agents ready to reshape their world.
How did Indonesia develop its citizens? Part. 2
From the previous section, Ruth McVey ended her paper with an observation (emphasis added):
“The New Order has not removed the circumstances that attracted people to the post-revolutionary PKI. … One could have imagined quite a few of the PKI leaders as business managers under another dispensation, and indeed the party’s educational work may have done its bit to increase Indonesians’ entrepreneurial potential. … In one sense, therefore, the PKI and New Order ideologies are different channels of the same stream, whose source is the great myth of modernity. At the same time, the values of popular participation and social justice which the PKI urged are suppressed but certainly not forgotten; they resonate in the urgings, now faint but stirring, for a new recognition of the Indonesian common man.”
It is striking that, despite their ideological gulf, both the PKI and the New Order pursued remarkably parallel strategies to shape and control the narrative of Indonesia by “educating” its citizens, particularly those in the countryside with little access to formal schooling, through carefully crafted curricula, vetted textbooks, and targeted teacher networks. In doing so, each regime sought not only to impart knowledge but also to embed its values, be they communist collectivism or state-centric Pancasila morality, directly into the hearts and minds of ordinary Indonesians, ensuring that the story of nationhood unfolded on terms favorable to the ruling elite.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the PKI pursued a deliberate strategy to seize control of Indonesia’s educational machinery. In 1957, President Sukarno appointed the pro-Communist academic Prijono as Minister of Education, enabling him to embed allies in senior posts, most notably replacing the secretary-general with Supardo, a fellow sympathizer, thus steering ministry personnel toward PKI-friendly programs. By 1959 to 1961, Prijono had rolled out the “Five Developments” (Panca Wardhana) and “Five Loves” (Panca Cinta) framework, purporting to implement Pancasila through civic-minded, materialist principles focused on morality, intellect, artistry, manual skills, and health but omitting Almighty God from the first pillar.
When religious leaders objected, PKI educators insisted the original Pancasila remained intact, merely implemented in a new rhetorical guise, an oblique tactic that failed to allay non-Communist fears and fueled intense debate over religious and national identity. Simultaneously, the party co-opted the Indonesian Teachers Union (PGRI), engineering pro-PKI slates for its 1962 congress and elevating figures like Subandri to the editorship of Suara Guru, and even secured seats on the prestigious Taman Siswa monthly journal, subtly infusing Dewantara’s nationalist movement with Marxist-tinged pedagogy.
Following the 1965 coup, the New Order reversed many of these incursions but embraced a similarly top-down control of educational narratives. Beginning in 1975, social studies were bifurcated into “Social Science” and a mandatory “Pendidikan Moral Pancasila” (Pancasila Moral Education), with all textbooks authored by Ministry staff or academic insiders and rigorously vetted by military-led committees. In 1978, Minister Daoed Joesoef appointed retired General Dardji Darmodihardjo to commandeer the Pancasila curriculum, extracting it from the Research and Development Center and placing it under Dardji’s directorial team, thereby ensuring a uniform, government-approved interpretation for every school and laying the groundwork for the later Pancasila courses.
On campuses, Ministerial Decree 28/U/1974 confined all political discussion to supervised, on-campus forums and outlawed demonstrations, while a normalization policy fractured student bodies into purely academic associations, yet students continued to publish exposés and petition Parliament through the late 1970s. Finally, the 1979 to 1980 P4 (Pedoman Pengamalan dan Penghayatan Pancasila) courses indoctrinated civil servants at every level, from multi-month programs for high-ranking officials to brief sessions for clerks, all aimed at forging a family spirit, the spirit of Pancasila within the state apparatus.
Thus, from Prijono’s stealthy PKI entryism to the New Order’s overt curricular engineering, both regimes recognized that shaping minds in and out of the classroom was paramount to controlling Indonesia’s destiny. Their parallel efforts, even when driven by antithetical ideologies, mirror the early debates at the 1945 BPUPKI meetings, suggesting that, perhaps, only those original framers of Pancasila could truly grasp its behavioral implications and safeguard it from successive partisan appropriations.
How did Indonesia develop its citizens? Part. 3
Now, we’ve entered a modern era in which “developing your citizens”, conceptualized as closing the “skill gap,” often means putting the onus on workers to upskill via courses and workshops, frequently provided by for-profit startups. Companies like Purwadhika Digital Technology School (coding bootcamps and digital marketing), Dicoding (mobile and web developer certification), and Skill Academy by Ruangguru (professional and vocational skills) have sprung up to meet this demand. Their promise? Equip job seekers with in-demand competencies and bridge the gap between what employers say they want and what applicants can offer.
But is this “skill gap” truly structural, as we often hear in developing-country discourse, or is it, at least in part, cyclical? Research on U.S. online job postings finds that employers raise their education and experience requirements when worker supply is abundant (i.e., in a recession) and relax them as labor markets tighten again. In other words, what many label a “skill shortage” can mask a pay gap dynamic: firms opportunistically demand ever-higher credentials when unemployment is high (more applicants to choose from), and rescind these demands when talent is scarce.
Cyclical “skill” vs. pay dynamics
During economic downturns, firms facing more applicants per vacancy increase their screening thresholds, requiring bachelor’s degrees where none were needed before or adding extra years of experience. Crucially, this shift tracks the unemployment rate rather than a true dearth of qualified candidates, effectively forcing prospective hires to “pay” for jobs with more credentials when the economy is weak.
If our goal is sustainable citizen development, we must recognize that upskilling startups isn’t curing a structural deficiency but often responding to a hiring strategy that fluctuates with the business cycle. The real antidote lies in:
Employer commitment to transparent hiring, aligning job requirements with actual on-the-job tasks rather than padding them during slack periods
Public-private partnerships that subsidize genuine skill development in underserved areas, for example, government-backed digital literacy programs in collaboration with education platforms
Continuous feedback loops between industry and educators so that curricula evolve with real skill needs, not just firms’ opportunistic requirements
By reframing the “skill gap” as a symptom of cyclical pay-gap tactics, we can redirect policy and entrepreneurial energy toward more structural, lasting solutions, ensuring that Indonesian citizens develop skills because they’re needed, not simply because firms raise the bar when they can.
Where do we go from here?
We’ve finally reached the end of our journey. Several ideas have been discussed:
The inherent trade-off in skill formation policies across countries lies in aligning them with the development of their industries.
The goal of the PKI was to teach modernity to the common people so they could develop a new cultural identity and address Indonesia’s fundamental problems through a historical and materialist lens.
The different strategies that both the PKI and the New Order regime used to become part of the ruling class included their efforts to infiltrate the government and instill their values in Indonesian citizens.
The conceptualization of the skill gap as a pay gap, and how startups focused on upskilling, need to adopt a more systematic approach to this issue.
And now, one final comment on the issue of artificial intelligence in education (which a lot portion of this newsletter was written by one). In the last chapter of Critical Perspectives on Technology and Education, Neil Selwyn outlines several ways to take a “critical” stance toward technology in education. One approach is to continuously ask “basic but challenging questions,” such as:
What is actually new here?
What are the unintended consequences or second-order effects?
What are the potential gains? What are the potential losses?
What underlying values and agendas are implicit?
In whose interests is this working? Who benefits, and in what ways?
What social problems is digital technology being presented as a solution to? Why now?
How responsive to a “technical fix” are these problems likely to be?
The purpose of this exercise, as noted in the chapter, is to avoid being:
"blighted by a prevalence of what Duncan-Andrade (2009) terms ‘hokey hope’ (i.e., a naïve view that somehow things will get better, despite the lack of evidence to warrant this view) accompanied by a fair amount of ‘mythical hope’ (i.e., a profoundly ahistorical and depoliticized denial of suffering that is rooted in celebrating individual exceptions) (p. 184)."
In the end, we must heed the words of Siswojo, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the People’s University Foundation (Jajasan Universitas Rakjat), who said in his introductory speech (emphasis added):
"We side with humanity because this is the stance of the people and of honest intellectuals, and because for us, knowledge and culture must serve humankind to elevate the conditions of life, both materially and spiritually."
And lastly, happy May Day and National Education Day!