Gojek superapp founder uses tech-style reforms to ‘disrupt’ Indonesia’s schools

The 160 pupils at Jakarta’s Madrasah Ibtidaiyah Al Ma’muriyah spend about half of their school week reading the Koran or studying Islamic script, habits and culture.

The focus on religious tuition, where even state school students often spend hours on extracurricular Islamic classes, is considered essential for building “character” in conservative Indonesia, which hosts the world’s biggest Muslim population.

“We emphasise good habits, like reciting the Koran,” said Joelianto, one of the teachers, speaking in an office whose collapsing roof is balancing on bamboo poles. Like many Indonesians, he goes by only one name.

However, about 50 per cent of Indonesia’s students have a literacy rate below a minimum competency level based on the OECD’s Pisa student assessment programme. The figure is worse for numeracy.

With neighbouring countries such as Vietnam aggressively vying to attract industries diversifying out of China, Indonesia’s poor education standards are being blamed for holding the country back.

Although south-east Asia’s largest economy has grown at about 5 per cent this year on the back of a commodities surge, the government believes it can boost growth by radically reforming education and adopting a system used in western countries.

In 2019, President Joko Widodo turned to Nadiem Anwar Makarim, a Harvard-educated entrepreneur, to lead the reform. The 38-year-old Makarim, who founded delivery and ride-hailing superapp Gojek, one of Indonesia’s most successful start-ups, began redirecting school and university systems away from rote learning towards literacy and numeracy testing, under a programme known as “emancipated learning”.

Makarim, the first education minister not to come from one of Indonesia’s two biggest Islamic organisations, likened his policy packages to a “22-episode Netflix series” in an interview with the Financial Times.

At each step, he encountered “huge resistance”, he said. But the reforms were crucial. Even if Indonesia’s economy grew rapidly, it could not create enough jobs in industry for the 2mn who graduated annually from its universities, he added.

“We will never have enough jobs. No matter how successful [we are]. Even if we grow at 5 or 6 per cent,” he said. “So that’s why creating financially literate, micro-entrepreneurs, people who are ready not just to get jobs when they graduate but to make their own living . . . is so important.” 

A self-described “disrupter”, Makarim similarly reformed the entrance exams for universities and gave undergraduates the right to spend up to one year out of four completing accredited courses in the corporate sector.

Technology is an important part of the changes. He introduced an ecommerce platform to increase transparency on the procurement of everything from sports equipment to computers. His ministry is also seeking to distribute laptops throughout the school system, especially to rural areas.

Critics, however, say his plan is too ambitious, given the scarring effects of the pandemic on education and the short timeframe — the country will vote for a new president in 2024.

Others argue Makarim is trying to treat the education system like a tech company in a country that is unprepared for such radical change. “He is a little too visionary and he is not surrounded by enough apparatus to make sure it is executable,” said a person familiar with the entrepreneur’s thinking. Parts of Indonesia, for instance, lack internet access and cannot use the Chromebook laptops they have been sent.

Some teachers say they are overwhelmed by new concepts as well as having to grapple with different digital platforms.

“As a headmaster, I’m ready for change, but it takes time and needs a process,” said Rahmat Hidayat, director of an elementary school in central Jakarta.

His team had spent hours browsing the internet to try to understand the new curriculum and the digital platforms they should be using.  

“Many teachers I speak to are confused,’‘ said Indra Charismiadji, an education activist. “The real problem is that instead of focusing on curriculum he should have focused on developing and training teachers. That is [Indonesia’s] weakness. Fancy apps and freedoms don’t make a difference if they don’t know how to teach.”

While 44mn students are educated in public schools, a large chunk of Indonesian students do not come under Makarim’s purview. Management of the largely privately funded madrassas, including the curriculum, is handled by the religious affairs ministry. The madrassas educated some 10mn students in the 2019-2020 school year, according to the ministry, while pesantrens, or Islamic boarding schools, have about 4.2mn pupils.

Legislation aimed at bringing the religious institutions into the fold, part of a broader omnibus bill, stalled last month in parliament.  

Makarim counters that many of those religious institutions already use the national education standard, adding that data for this year showed there had been a slight improvement in the scores of the religious schools versus the national average in numeracy and literacy.

The pandemic crisis also created a greater willingness to find new ways to educate students, he feels.

“Education became front, right and centre. So that’s what paved the way [and] gave me and my team the licence to create these big reforms,” said Makarim.

However, at the madrassa in Cikini, whose historic mosque was first built by one of the country’s most famous painters, Raden Saleh, Makarim’s sweeping reforms still seem far away.

With a bookcase crammed with texts such as How to quickly learn to read the Koran, Joelianto insisted his pupils were fine academically.

“Most of the students here from the Islamic elementary school can enter public junior high school with good grades,” he said with pride.