education info

There are many definitions for quality education but we feel that this definition from UNICEF (below) is complete enough:

* Learners who are healthy, well-nourished and ready to participate and learn, and supported in learning by their families and communities;
* Environments that are healthy, safe, protective and gender-sensitive, and provide adequate resources and facilities;
* Content that is reflected in relevant curricula and materials for the acquisition of basic skills, especially in the areas of literacy, numeracy and skills for life, and knowledge in such areas as gender,
health, nutrition, HIV/AIDS prevention and peace;
* Processes through which trained teachers use child-centred teaching approaches in well-managed classrooms and schools and skilful assessment to facilitate learning and reduce disparities;
* Outcomes that encompass knowledge, skills and attitudes, and are linked to national goals for education and positive participation in society.

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We believe that improving the quality of Teaching and Learning Activities (TLA) is the most important issue related to achieving quality education in Indonesia. However, before we discuss specific TLA issues we need to discuss some general issues and define some specific issues that determine the quality of education.

Is the objective of Teaching and Learning Activities to deliver/transfer some specific information or knowledge, or to teach a specific skill or competency to the learner? Or are there broader objectives to be achieved?

We can still remember when Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) emerged formally in Indonesia. Many teachers in the field were quite confused. This was due to a number of issues including the fact that many competencies itemized in the curriculum were not clear competencies, and they would be very difficult to assess. Another reason for the confusion was that teachers didn't believe that they would have enough time to teach and assess each of the competencies, as there were so many of them.

However, this is not a problem because we don't need to teach each of the competencies individually. In one lesson we can teach and assess many competencies simultaneously.

In fact in every class we are obliged to teach as many competencies as we can whether we use CBC or not.


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A Major responsibility of schools entering this new era of globalization is to prepare students for the new challenges that are rapidly changing our society.

One of the greatest challenges currently facing our youth is finding meaningful employment. The ability to speak a foreign language and computer literacy are currently two of the most common criteria required from people wishing to enter the workforce in Indonesia (and globally).

As only about 20-30% of Senior Secondary School SMA graduates nationally continue on to formal tertiary education, and with computers now infiltrating every aspect of human life it places a high burden of responsibility upon our education system to improve the development of our students' language and computer literacies. The study of technology is very important and schools are responsible for teaching technology (ICT) at all levels because many students are still failing to continue their education beyond primary and junior secondary levels.


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by David Orr

What went wrong with contemporary culture and with education? There is some insight in literature: Christopher Marlowe's Faust, who trades his soul for knowledge and power; Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, who refuses to take responsibility for his creation; Herman Melville's Captain Ahab, who says "All my means are sane, my motive and object mad." In these characters we encounter the essence of the modern drive to dominate nature.

Historically, Francis Bacon's proposed union between knowledge and power foreshadows the contemporary alliance between government, business, and knowledge that has wrought so much mischief. Galileo's separation of the intellect foreshadows the dominance of the analytical mind over that part given to creativity, humor, and wholeness. And in Descartes' epistemology, one finds the roots of the radical separation of self and object. Together these three laid the foundations for modern education, foundations now enshrined in myths we have come to accept without question. Let me suggest six.

First, there is the myth that ignorance is a solvable problem. Ignorance is not a solvable problem, but rather an inescapable part of the human condition. The advance of knowledge always carries with it the advance of some form of ignorance. In 1930, after Thomas Midgely Jr. discovered CFCs, what had previously been a piece of trivial ignorance became a critical, life-threatening gap in the human understanding of the biosphere. No one thought to ask "what does this substance do to what?" until the early 1970s, and by 1990 CFCs had created a general thinning of the ozone layer worldwide. With the discovery of CFCs knowledge increased; but like the circumference of an expanding circle, ignorance grew as well.

A second myth is that with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet Earth.. "Managing the planet" has a nice a ring to it. It appeals to our fascination with digital readouts, computers, buttons and dials. But the complexity of Earth and its life systems can never be safely managed. The ecology of the top inch of topsoil is still largely unknown, as is its relationship to the larger systems of the biosphere.

What might be managed is us: human desires, economies, politics, and communities. But our attention is caught by those things that avoid the hard choices implied by politics, morality, ethics, and common sense. It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.

A third myth is that knowledge is increasing and by implication human goodness. There is an information explosion going on, by which I mean a rapid increase of data, words, and paper. But this explosion should not be taken for an increase in knowledge and wisdom, which cannot so easily by measured. What can be said truthfully is that some knowledge is increasing while other kinds of knowledge are being lost. David Ehrenfeld has pointed out that biology departments no longer hire faculty in such areas as systematics, taxonomy, or ornithology. In other words, important knowledge is being lost because of the recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering, which are more lucrative, but not more important, areas of inquiry. We still lack the the science of land health that Aldo Leopold called for half a century ago.

It is not just knowledge in certain areas that we're losing, but vernacular knowledge as well, by which I mean the knowledge that people have of their places. In the words of Barry Lopez:

"[I am] forced to the realization that something strange, if not dangerous, is afoot. Year by year the number of people with firsthand experience in the land dwindles. Rural populations continue to shift to the cities.... In the wake of this loss of personal and local knowledge, the knowledge from which a real geography is derived, the knowledge on which a country must ultimately stand, has come something hard to define but I think sinister and unsettling."

In the confusion of data with knowledge is a deeper mistake that learning will make us better people. But learning, as Loren Eiseley once said, is endless and "In itself it will never make us ethical [people]." Ultimately, it may be the knowledge of the good that is most threatened by all of our other advances. All things considered, it is possible that we are becoming more ignorant of the things we must know to live well and sustainably on the Earth.

A fourth myth of higher education is that we can adequately restore that which we have dismantled. In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production. As a result of incomplete education, we've fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are.

Fifth, there is a myth that the purpose of education is that of giving you the means for upward mobility and success. Thomas Merton once identified this as the "mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade." When asked to write about his own success, Merton responded by saying that "if it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naiveté, and I would take very good care never to do the same again." His advice to students was to "be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success."

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more "successful" people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.

Finally, there is a myth that our culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement: we alone are modern, technological, and developed. This, of course, represents cultural arrogance of the worst sort, and a gross misreading of history and anthropology. Recently this view has taken the form that we won the cold war and that the triumph of capitalism over communism is complete. Communism failed because it produced too little at too high a cost. But capitalism has also failed because it produces too much, shares too little, also at too high a cost to our children and grandchildren. Communism failed as an ascetic morality. Capitalism failed because it destroys morality altogether. This is not the happy world that any number of feckless advertisers and politicians describe. We have built a world of sybaritic wealth for a few and Calcuttan poverty for a growing underclass. At its worst it is a world of crack on the streets, insensate violence, anomie, and the most desperate kind of poverty. The fact is that we live in a disintegrating culture. In the words of Ron Miller, editor of Holistic Review:

"Our culture does not nourish that which is best or noblest in the human spirit. It does not cultivate vision, imagination, or aesthetic or spiritual sensitivity. It does not encourage gentleness, generosity, caring, or compassion. Increasingly in the late 20th Century, the economic-technocratic-statist worldview has become a monstrous destroyer of what is loving and life-affirming in the human soul."


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by David Orr

Measured against the agenda of human survival, how might we rethink education? Let me suggest six principles.

First, all education is environmental education. By what is included or excluded we teach students that they are part of or apart from the natural world. To teach economics, for example, without reference to the laws of thermodynamics or those of ecology is to teach a fundamentally important ecological lesson: that physics and ecology have nothing to do with the economy. That just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout all of the curriculum.

A second principle comes from the Greek concept of paideia. The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one's person. Subject matter is simply the tool. Much as one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of marble, one uses ideas and knowledge to forge one's own personhood. For the most part we labor under a confusion of ends and means, thinking that the goal of education is to stuff all kinds of facts, techniques, methods, and information into the student's mind, regardless of how and with what effect it will be used. The Greeks knew better.

Third, I would like to propose that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world. The results of a great deal of contemporary research bear resemblance to those foreshadowed by Mary Shelley: monsters of technology and its byproducts for which no one takes responsibility or is even expected to take responsibility. Whose responsibility is Love Canal? Chernobyl? Ozone depletion? The Valdez oil spill? Each of these tragedies were possible because of knowledge created for which no one was ultimately responsible. This may finally come to be seen for what I think it is: a problem of scale. Knowledge of how to do vast and risky things has far outrun our ability to use it responsibly. Some of it cannot be used responsibly, which is to say safely and to consistently good purposes.

Fourth, we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities. I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio, which was largely destroyed by corporate decisions to "disinvest" in the economy of the region. In this case MBAs, educated in the tools of leveraged buyouts, tax breaks, and capital mobility have done what no invading army could do: they destroyed an American city with total impunity on behalf of something called the "bottom line." But the bottom line for society includes other costs, those of unemployment, crime, higher divorce rates, alcoholism, child abuse, lost savings, and wrecked lives. In this instance what was taught in the business schools and economics departments did not include the value of good communities or the human costs of a narrow destructive economic rationality that valued efficiency and economic abstractions above people and community.

My fifth principle follows and is drawn from William Blake. It has to do with the importance of "minute particulars" and the power of examples over words. Students hear about global responsibility while being educated in institutions that often invest their financial weight in the most irresponsible things. The lessons being taught are those of hypocrisy and ultimately despair. Students learn, without anyone ever saying it, that they are helpless to overcome the frightening gap between ideals and reality. What is desperately needed are faculty and administrators who provide role models of integrity, care, thoughtfulness, and institutions that are capable of embodying ideals wholly and completely in all of their operations.

Finally, I would like to propose that the way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses. Process is important for learning. Courses taught as lecture courses tend to induce passivity. Indoor classes create the illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls isolated from what students call without apparent irony the "real world." Dissecting frogs in biology classes teaches lessons about nature that no one would verbally profess. Campus architecture is crystallized pedagogy that often reinforces passivity, monologue, domination, and artificiality. My point is simply that students are being taught in various and subtle ways beyond the content of courses.


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by David Orr

If education is to be measured against the standard of sustainability, what can be done? I would like to make four propsals. First, I would like to propose that you engage in a campus-wide dialogue about the way you conduct your business as educators. Does four years here make your graduates better planetary citizens or does it make them, in Wendell Berry's words, "itinerant professional vandals"? Does this college contribute to the development of a sustainable
regional economy or, in the name of efficiency, to the processes of destruction?

My second suggestion is to examine resource flows on this campus: food, energy, water, materials, and waste. Faculty and students should together study the wells, mines, farms, feedlots, and forests that supply the campus as well as the dumps where you send your waste. Collectively, begin a process of finding ways to shift the buying power of this institution to support better alternatives that do less environmental damage, lower carbon dioxide emissions, reduce use of toxic substances, promote energy efficiency and the use of solar energy, help to build a sustainable regional economy, cut long-term costs, and provide an example to other institutions. The results of these studies should be woven into the curriculum as interdisplinary courses, seminars, lectures, and research. No student should graduate without understanding how to analyze resource flows and without the opportunity to participate in the creation of real solutions to real problems.

Third, reexamaine how your endowment works. Is it invested according to the Valdez principles? Is it invested in companies doing responsible things that the world needs? Can some part of it be invested locally to help leverage energy efficiency and the evolution of a sustainable economy throughout the region?

Finally, I propose that you set a goal of ecological literacy for all of your students. No student should graduate from this or any other educational institution without a basic comprehension of:

* the laws of thermodynamics
* the basic principles of ecology
* carrying capacity
* energetics
* least-cost, end-use analysis
* how to live well in a place
* limits of technology
* appropriate scale
* sustainable agriculture and forestry
* steady-state economics
* environmental ethics

Do graduates of this college, in Aldo Leopold's words, know that "they are only cogs in an ecological mechanism such that, if they will work with that mechanism, their mental wealth and material wealth can expand indefinitely (and) if they refuse to work with it, it will ultimately grind them to dust." Leopold asked: "If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?"



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By Akhmad Sudrajat

Estimation did by teacher to usufruct learning to measure interest attainment zoom participant is taught, and is utilized as material of upturned write-up collation yielding learned, and fixs learning process.

Estimation is done consistently, sistematik, and is programmed by use of essays and nontes in forms to be written or oral, performance watch, attitude measurement, opuses yielding estimation as task, project and / or product, portofolio, and estimation self. Learnings yielding estimation utilize Education Estimation Default and agglomerate Estimation Guidance Subject.

A. Monitoring

1. Monitoring processes learning be done on planning phase, performing, and learning result estimation.
2. Monitoring did by focussed group discussion, watch, registry, recording, wawacara, and documentation.
3. Monitoring activity performed by satuan's head and supervisor
education.

B. Supervision

1. Supervision processes learning be done on planning phase, performing, and learning result estimation.
2. Learning supervision evened out by example application, discussion, training, and consultation
3. Activity supervises to be done by satuan's head and supervisor education.

C. Evaluation

1. Evaluation processes learning be done to determine learning quality as a whole, ranging learning process planning phase, performing processes learning, and learning result estimation.
2. Evaluation processes learning evened out by:
a. comparing executed learning process teacher with standard process,
b. identifying teacher performance in processes learning according to teacher interest.
3. Evaluation processes learning centralize on the whole teacher performance in processes learning.

D. Reporting

Monitoring activity result, supervision, and learning process evaluation is reported to behalf functionary.

E. Follow-up

1. Support and appreciation was given unto to learn already standard pock.
2. Didactic rebuke given unto by teacher that haven't accomplished default.
3. Teacher was given by chance to follow training / more upgrading.


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By Depdiknas

Teaching and learning activity quality will regard performing success zoom SKM / SSN. Therefore, teaching and learning activity for participant is taught that have ability and extraordinary intelligence needs to be designed and is managed in such a way face so gets to be reached by velocity result studies optimal ala, conversely. As interposed by Caroll and Bloom (1974 deep Munandar, 2001) that there are many educative participant that has talent, yen, ability and extraordinary intelligence, even contrariwise therefore in bring off teaching and learning activity can apply individual's service and group service.

Application services individual's ala take in implication in management namely added energy, medium and fund. Therefore done by affiliate among services individual and group, with that savvy in a general way education service is given on participant group is taught that have ability in same matapelajaran. Even teaching and learning activity is done clically, estimation to yielding progress studies to constitute individual ability estimation each participant is taught. But estimation which is designed to know ability and studying progress / working group result.

Executed learning model current points on principle that interposed by Bruner (Munandar, 2001) which is give perceivable special experience participant is taught; teaching is given according to science structure / scholarly so participant is taught more readily absorbs it; teaching representation formation that more effective and considered deserts suitably. In learning performing on SKM / SSN not only being emphasized on intellectual aspect attainment only, but in learning needs to be created by activity and studying atmosphere that enable its amends all educations deep dimension, as: character, personality, intellectual, emotional and social. So is expected attained upturned and formative poised one among all that dimension.

Learning strategy that fits for to reach dimension upon, are focussed learning strategy on studying how necessarily studies (Zamroni, 2000). This strategy has to emphasize on tall intellectual ability developing, having sensitivity (sensitif) to learned progress of level conceptual low to increase tall intellectual. For it to methodic most appropriate learning for example inductive learning method, divergen and thinks evaluative. Memorizings model learning on learning programs student that have ability more insofar maybe prevented by gives pressure on tech one gets orientation on invented (discovery oriented) and inductive approaching.

Of explanation upon most verily learning which happens to constitute impelemntasi of Dick's model and Carey where role learns or main task learn to be that of learning designer, with additional role as executor and teaching and learning activity assessor (Riyanto, 2001). In other words teaching and learning strategy that applies in teaches on SKM / SSN is not just emphasize on intellectual aspect just but on also on creative process and bethinks high in strategy form studies that varying one has to be created by creative ala teacher. read more...

According to Arends (2001) a teacher in perform learning shall feature three aspect are of important. Aspect third this is: (1 ) leaderships, (2 ) instruction application via gaze face with educative participant, (3 ) working with educative participant, kolega, and oldster. To build class and school as organisational as studying, aspect third that has coherent.

On leadership aspect, there are many teacher role equals boss role that employs at other organization type. Expected boss can plot, motivate, and mengkoordinasi talks shop so every individual can work independent ala, and helps memformulasi and assesses learning aim attainment. In perform teacher learning shall design and does work efficiently, creative, perform to pull and gets authority as an actor be in front braze, and its result shall accomplish quality default.

On instruction application aspect, teacher in perform learning at brazes through gaze face to pass on information and leading what does have to be done by educative participant. On apsek this thing that needs to be noticed is elemental concentration or participant attention be taught to breakdown of material which passed on by teacher. In a general way participants full attention teach to happen on 5 until 10 first minute, attention afterwards it will be down. For it to learn has to try look after participant attention is taught, e.g. with give a lead material or concept purpose that chastened at the site.

On collaboration aspect, to reach optimal learning result teacher gets to do collaboration with educative participant, kolega learns, and oldster. Faced problem learns to get as problem at brazes, or participant individual problem is taught. Problem at brazes to get talked over by other teacher that teaches at same class or one teaches subject with at other class. Participant individual problem teaches to be spoken by participant oldster is taught. Thus all happening problem class gets to be solved.

Learning basically constitute interaction among educative participant and studying source. Learning at brazes happening because available interaction among educative participant by learns. Teacher not even gives instruction, but also act as membered as organization studies and as chief as on work condition that komplek. All teacher behaviour in and outside class will regard learning activity success.

Learning model dikategorikan can become two, which is traditional model that gets center on learns and konstruktivis's model that gets center on educative participant (Arends, 2001). tradisonal's learning model comprise of discourse or presentation, direct instruction, and concept teaching. Learning model that gets center on educative participant or konstruktivis comprise of studying kooperatif, instruction gets problem basis, and class discussion. read more...

There is two main things that need to be noticed on independent schooled learning model, which is: (1 ) learnings, and (2 ) evaluations. Main role learns at school is perform learning. Learning constitutes activity that utilizes tech, method, and strategy that sistematik to mengkreasi ideal conjugate among curriculum and participant was taught by ala sistematik.

Learning tech is part of each method, and many methods at merged as strategy, one that constitute ability combine and teacher skill to apply method and learning strategy. There are many tech is utilized for example: (1 ) pass on information, (2 ) motivate, (3 ) give support, (4 ) listen, (5 ) give and answer questions, and (6 ) managements.

Learning strategy is combine methodic that consecutive and is designed that participant educativing to reach interest default. Menururt Kindsvatter, Wilen, & Ishler (1996:169) developed formal strategy bases effective learning research and emphasizing on superordinates learned result be:

1. Active teaching: in focus academic, learning led by teacher by use of material which most structure and in a row.
2. masteri's learning: an individuals diagnostic approaching on learning whereabouts participant educativing to do learning and is tested according to speed it to reach interest.
3. kooperatif's learning: coeval tutor purpose, group learning, and collaboration to push educative participant studies.

Learning model on SKM / SSN emphasizes on potency and participant the need is taught to be able to autodidact which is built community thru studying at brazes. Strategy to motivate participant educativing to build that studying community covers: (1 ) believe participant potency are taught, (2 ) build intrinsik's motivations, (3 ) utilize positive feels, (4 ) build participant studying yens are taught, (5 ) build agreeable studying, (6 ) meet the need educative participants, (7 ) up to learning aims, and (8 ) memfasilitasi group developments.
In summary learning principle on SKM / SSN is:

1. Get center on educative participant, which is how participant teaches to study.
2. Utilize various method that make easy educative participant studies.
3. Learning process gets kontekstual's character.
4. Interactive, inspiratif, rejoice, motivate, against and deep climatic kondusif's one.
5. Emphasize on ability and willingness asks from participant be taught
6. Done via learned group and coeval tutor.
7. Allocating time according to participant learning ability is taught
8. Performing remedial's program and enrichment corresponds to to usufruct formatif's evaluation. read more...