Why young people leave school early in Papua, Indonesia, and education policy options to address this problem

ABSTRACT

This paper identifies the reasons children and young people leave school early in Merauke, Papua, and advances education policy initiatives to address these causes. Indonesia has a policy of 12 years of compulsory schooling, but many in Papua leave school early. The Indonesian government considers that children mainly leave school early for economic reasons, and addresses the problem through its social welfare programmes, as well as ‘supply- side’ factors such as the number of schools. This paper uses mainly ethnographic data, especially life histories collected from 22 young people and adults who left school early, to argue that besides economic reasons, the on-again- off-again history of schooling, the extremely problematic nature of that schooling, as well as socio-cultural causes such as the stigmatisation of the local Marind people, self-stigmatisation and cultural discontinuity, combine to push children to leave school early. Multiple initiatives are suggested to improve the quality of education.

KEYWORDS:

• Leaving school early
• children out-of-school
• education policy
• Merauke
• Papua
• Indonesia
• Marind

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This was the Discovery Project titled ‘Understanding Social, Economic and Health Vulnerabilities in Indonesia’ (DP170101044) funded by the Australia Research Council. The Human Ethics Committee of The University of Western Australia gave Ethics Approval of this research (RA 4/1/9343). All names of individuals and the village are pseudonyms.

2. Jones et al described this as the pengampu system in Nusa Tenggara Timur: ‘Many students are exploited under the pengampu system, and they have to work so hard that their performance in school suffers.’ (1998, 68).

3. Village Funds (Dana Desa) are considerable – amounting to Rp.2 billion pa in Yaba Kai – and many villages use Village Funds to pay a kindergarten teacher’s salary. This could happen in Yaba Kai, and indeed Rosina has been designated honorary kindergarten teacher.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australia Research Council [DP170101044].