TEACHING IN INDONESIA

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29250, 7 July 1960, Page 20

TEACHING IN INDONESIA

N,Z. Woman Tells Of Difficulties Indonesian teachers work from 730 am. to 2 pm. without a meal break and only a short break for a cup of tea about 11 am. This was discovered by Mrs P. Brewster who for the last three years and a half has worked as head of the English department of a Christian university and teachers’ college in Salatiga in Java. Mrs Brejvster and her husband were sent by the National Council of Churches in New Zealand to lecture in the college. She was formerly a teacher in a secondary school in Christchurch. “Teachers get paid so little that they cannot eat sufficient rice to make them healthy. The result is that pupils rarely meet a dynamic teacher through the whole of their course. They are good teachers,” said Mrs Brewster. "Under the conditions that they work they are astonishingly good teachers.” Mrs Brewster said that teachers worked 35 hours a week.

“The pupils are passive. Between the ages of seven and 17 they copy things from the blackboard and they learn by heart. They do not write essays.” Mrs Brewster described the Michigan system of teaching English. This system was brought to the schools by Americans and is now the official teaching policy of the Indonesian government. “In the Michigan system the language is speech,” said Mrs Brewster. Literature is regarded as bf secondary importance. “It is basically an imitation of

what the teacher says. Questions are fired at the pupil and he knows the pat answers. It does get them talking,” Mrs Brewster said. Mrs Brewster said that she had used the Michigan system herself although she said that she would not stick to it alone. She believes that language is for the communication of ideas and that the system does not sufficiently take account of this because it ignores literature. The Indonesian people did not read literature, Mrs Brewster said. Indonesian was a new language and novels and short stories were only now being written. There was an old Javanese literature but there were only a few who read it. She found that those students at the college who had gained some knowledge of European literature through the teaching given by the Dutch were better fitted to understand English novels, she said.