Jakarta, 7th February 2006. “We need to transform the paradigm of the national education,” the Director of Institute for Education Reform, Utomo Dananjaya, stated during the Media Forum at Sampoerna Foundation (SF)’s office.

The Media Forum attended by 16 media and the Directorate General for Quality Improvement of Teachers and Educators Fasli Jalal was organized by SF and Fortadik (Education Journalist Forum).

Utomo explained that our teachers still utilized ancient paradigm when teaching. “Therefore, there is a need to transform the teacher’s paradigm to give birth to learning pattern that promotes freedom and self-improvement,” he added. According to him, changing the paradigm was also related to changing the ideology of education and this task was nothing but easy. Therefore, the first thing to do was to rectify the education quality of our teachers.

Fasli asserted that, “The role of principals as the managers of the school needs to be elaborated with more emphasis in school management. On top of that, we should have a school committee that functions as the school’s stakeholders. With this committee, we will include the representatives from the teachers, parents, society, and perhaps the students as well”.

With the existence of the school committee, the supervision or the monitoring of the pedagogical world can be maintained properly. He also added that the school itself should have its local life, so it requires its own freedom, autonomy, transparency and accountability.

Both of them agreed that the presence of LPTK (the Institute of Teacher’s Education = Lembaga Pendidikan Tenaga Kependidikan) is fundamental to improve the quality of teachers as well as the quality of learning system in the class. Yet such commitment requires appropriate and accurate strategy. For Fasli, “We are already in the right path, because those teacher’s institutes have inserted new theories and implemented them in their curriculum”.

To ensure the effectiveness of the transformation, a balanced legal bind is also needed. Fasli affirmed by stating, “We even offer some ideas to help formulate the draft for the government’s bill while the government is preparing its team for this project. We promise to support the government by uploading the draft to our website and distribute the information to the public”.