“There should be no inserted or sponsored students in
these premier schools—from anyone, under any pretext, or for any purpose
whatsoever.”
West Java Governor Dedi Mulyadi said this firmly, the way a
man says something he suspects he will have to repeat, louder, in front of
people who will pretend not to hear him. His voice had the particular flatness
of a man who has dealt with cheaters before, who knows precisely how they
smile, how they shake your hand, how they look you directly in the eye while
their other hand is reaching for something that isn’t theirs.
He was talking about Sekolah Maung—the Superior Human
School, they called it, which is the kind of name that should give you pause if
you’re the sort of person who pays attention to names. Superior human.
Think about that for a moment. Think about what it implies about everyone else.
Registration had opened late last May. The phone lines lit
up like a Christmas tree that had been doused in gasoline.
Any school principals or selection committee members caught
cheating, Mulyadi added, would be immediately removed and terminated. This was
meant to reassure people. It did not entirely reassure people. It never does.
Because here’s the thing about cheating, the thing they don’t put in the
brochures: it doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t knock. It slides under the
door in the dark, and by the time you smell it, it’s already made itself
comfortable in the kitchen, helping itself to whatever it wants from the
refrigerator.
---
Sekolah Maung was a populist program, they said. It was
designed to overhaul secondary education across the whole of West Java.
Forty-one public schools—twenty-eight senior high schools, thirteen
vocational—stretching from Bogor to Depok, from Bekasi to Bandung, all the way
out to Cirebon. A long arm, reaching. The kind of reach that looks generous
from a distance and feels like something else entirely when it’s your arm being
grabbed.
Dedi Mulyadi had designed it as an incubator. An incubator
for high-potential students. He envisioned their graduates as Manusa Waluya—well-rounded
individuals who were physically healthy, intellectually sharp, emotionally
stable, socially sensitive, spiritually grounded. Five Sundanese values from
the Gapura Pancawaluya: cageur, bageur, bener, pinter, singer. Healthy,
kind-hearted, integrity-driven, intelligent, responsive and creative.
It was beautiful, the way a blueprint is beautiful—clean
lines, no blood on it yet.
Through this framework, West Java aimed to produce a golden
generation. Golden. That word again. Every generation that gets sorted and
selected and fast-tracked gets called golden by somebody. The ones who don’t
make the cut—what do you call them? The dross? Nobody puts that in a
press release.
---
Unlike regular schools that relied on geographic zoning—the
simple democratic idea that you go to the school nearest your house, the school
your neighbors’ kids attend, the school that belongs to your neighborhood—Sekolah
Maung offered what they called an Academic Potential Pathway.
Here’s what that pathway required: a minimum intelligence
score of 130 on the Wechsler scale.
One-thirty.
Verified by tests from licensed psychologists or accredited
universities.
They also had to pass an Academic Ability Test that
evaluated advanced analytical literacy and numeracy. This highly competitive
pathway—the golden door, you might call it—accounted for only ten percent of
total enrollment. Ten percent of the seats in the school of superior humans.
The remaining seventy percent were filled through broader
academic competition, which sounds more democratic until you remember that “broader
academic competition” is still a competition, and competitions have losers, and
the losers here were children.
Children who would go home and wonder, in that awful private
way kids wonder about things, whether there was something wrong with them.
Whether they were, in some fundamental and unfixable way, less than.
---
It reminded people, those who had been paying attention for
long enough, of another program. The RSBI—the Rintisan Sekolah Bertaraf
Internasional. The International Standard Schools. Say it slow. Let it roll
around in your mouth. International Standard. There’s a magic trick in
those words, a prestidigitator’s sleight of hand: they sound like they’re
lifting something up, but what they’re really doing is drawing a line.
The RSBI, similarly, had prioritized rigorous selection. It
had concentrated high-achieving students. It had, in practice, faced heavy
criticism for creating unequal access to education.
In practice. That’s where the devil lives, isn’t it?
In practice. Theory is clean. Theory is the blueprint with no blood on it. Practice
is the thing that happens at three in the morning when nobody’s looking.
On January 8th, 2013—the kind of date people remember the
way they remember where they were when something ended—Indonesia’s
Constitutional Court struck the whole thing down. Decision No. 5/PUU-X/2012.
Article 50, paragraph 3 of Law No. 20 of 2003 on the National Education System
was ruled unconstitutional, stripped of its legal force, sent to the
administrative equivalent of the graveyard.
Dust to dust. Policy to policy.
---
The lawsuit had come from civil society groups. Regular
people, organized, who had a name: the Advocacy Team Against the
Commercialization of Education. Lawyers Wahyu Wagiman and Andi Muttaqien led
them. Organizations like Indonesia Corruption Watch. Educational figures—Milang
Tauhida, Darmaningtyas, Lody F. Paat, Jumono, Febri Hendri—names that will mean
nothing to you unless you were there, unless you were fighting, which is
exactly how history swallows the people who actually made it.
“This discriminatory policy,” the plaintiffs wrote in their
press release, “resulted in the Ministry of National Education pouring massive
funding into schools that were already elite from the start, rather than
allocating special funds to underdeveloped schools.”
Read that again. Let it sit.
Schools that were already elite from the start.
Already elite. Already in possession of the nice things, the modern labs, the
qualified teachers, the gleaming floors that caught the morning light. And the
ministry—the body tasked with educating the children of the entire country, the
poor ones and the rich ones and the ones in between—was shoveling money toward
them. Like giving the fattest kid at the party the biggest slice of cake.
Roughly thirteen hundred RSBI schools existed at the time:
about two hundred and thirty-nine elementary schools, three hundred and
fifty-six junior high schools, more than four hundred senior high and
vocational schools. Behind the international label, critics argued, these
schools charged exorbitant, non-transparent fees. Tens of millions of rupiah
per year. For public schools. Schools that were, by definition, supposed to be
subsidized by the state.
The Constitutional Court sided with the plaintiffs. Of
course it did. The math was simple enough that even a child—one of those
children, sitting in a regular school with the water-stained ceiling tiles and
the textbooks from several years ago—could do it.
Justice Hamdan Zoelva, reading the ruling, also took issue
with the requirement to use English as the primary medium of instruction. He
argued, and the Court agreed, that “international standard” was the kind of
phrase that could erode national pride in the Indonesian language and culture.
That measuring excellence by English proficiency was misguided. That it ran
counter to the true essence of national education.
He was right. But being right doesn’t mean being heard, and
being heard doesn’t mean being remembered, and being remembered doesn’t mean a
damn thing changes.
---
Here is the thing about systems. Here is the secret that
everyone in every country learns eventually, usually too late to do anything
about it:
Systems don’t die when you kill them.
They go underground. They change their names. They put on a
new coat.
Although the Constitutional Court decision sought to
eliminate educational elitism, many regions quietly preserved the advantages of
former RSBI schools long after the program was dissolved. Quietly. That
word. That small, terrible, utterly ordinary word.
In East Java, the education department explicitly
instructed that the quality of ex-RSBI schools be maintained. In Subang, the
Education Department head stated cheerfully that the cancellation had no
significant operational impact. Schools that had been RSBI continued to meet
the eight National Education Standards. They kept their rigorous curricula,
their top-tier facilities, their highly qualified teachers.
The sign came down. Everything else stayed.
Because here’s what money does that the courts cannot undo:
it sediments. It builds up in layers over decades—better labs, better
libraries, better parking lots, better everything—until the advantage isn’t in
any one thing you can point to and strike down. It’s in the walls
themselves. It’s in the culture of a place, the accumulated expectation
that this school produces winners, that these hallways are the hallways of the
future. High-achieving students and wealthy families came to them like iron
filings to a magnet. You can rename the magnet. You cannot change its field.
---
The sorting of children has deep roots in Indonesia. Roots
that go down past the RSBI era, past the reforms and the lawsuits and the
rulings, all the way back to the New Order, when students were sorted by their Ebtanas
scores—the NEM—into coveted schools or consolation-prize schools, and those
scores dictated their futures the way a judge dictates a sentence. This is
where you go. This is who you are.
In the 1990s, it became kelas unggulan—excellent
class programs. Specially selected students, enriched programs heavy on science
and math and English. These tracks spread because they were seen as fostering
competitive learning environments. They spread the way rumors spread, the way
kudzu spreads: because they could, because nothing stopped them, because there
was always another principal willing to put up the sign.
What the tracks also did was create labels. Excellent
and regular. And if you’ve ever been a child—and you have been, every
one of you reading this has been—you know exactly what it feels like to be
handed the wrong label. To see the other kids disappear through the door you
cannot open. To wonder what they’re doing in there. To wonder what’s wrong with
you.
The feeling doesn’t go away when you grow up. It just goes
somewhere quieter.
---
Around the same time as the kelas unggulan spread, a
different kind of school appeared, backed by military and state elite circles.
SMA Taruna Nusantara in Magelang—conceived by General L.B. Moerdani, opened in
1990 by General Try Sutrisno. Semi-military discipline. Civic education.
Religious values. The kind of school that produces a certain type of person:
confident, connected, destined.
Its graduates went on to top universities, military
academies, police training. Several joined the current Cabinet. These things
are not unrelated. They never are.
Meanwhile, B.J. Habibie—the engineer, the dreamer, the man
who understood that nations are built by people who know things—established MAN
Insan Cendekia through the Agency for the Assessment and Application of
Technology. In Serpong and Gorontalo, science and technology and Islamic
values, woven together. A different vision of the golden generation. No less
exclusive, but differently motivated.
---
In 2017, Education Minister Muhadjir Effendy tried something
radical. He tried the obvious thing. The thing that sounds almost too simple: what
if kids just went to the school nearest their house?
The geographic zoning system for new student admissions—PPDB,
they called it. Distance from home to school, not test scores, not intelligence
quotients, not ability tests evaluated by licensed psychologists. Just: how
far do you live?
“In the long term,” Muhadjir said, “this will achieve a more
even distribution of educational quality.”
He was probably right. Long terms are long. They extend past
the careers of the people who implement things, past the patience of
middle-class parents, past the attention spans of the news cycle.
The system ran into roadblocks immediately. Unequal
infrastructure. Uneven teacher distribution. The persistent, stubborn,
maddening stigma of peripheral schools—the ones on the edges of things, the
ones with the older equipment and the newer teachers and the students whose
parents couldn’t figure out how to game the system.
And families did game it. Of course they did. They are not
villains for this; they are parents, and parents will do what parents do. A
2019 Kompas report highlighted that families had begun forging residency
documents to secure spots in favored schools. Fake addresses. Phantom
households. Entire fictional lives constructed for the purpose of getting a
child through a particular set of doors.
Indonesia’s deep-seated culture of academic meritocracy, the
report noted, proved too difficult to dismantle.
Too difficult to dismantle. There it is. The thing
underneath the thing. Meritocracy sounds fair. Meritocracy sounds like the
opposite of privilege. But meritocracy is only as fair as the conditions that
precede the merit test—and in a country where the gap between the school with
the gleaming floors and the school with the water-stained ceiling tiles can be
measured in decades of accumulated advantage, the merit test is not measuring
merit.
It’s measuring head start.
---
More recently—October 2025—the Ministry of Higher Education,
Science, and Technology introduced Sekolah Garuda. An exclusive educational
ecosystem. The name means eagle, and eagles, as anyone will tell you,
are apex predators.
“We are designing Sekolah Garuda to produce young fighters,”
said Minister Brian Yuliarto. “Young Garudas—whose competitors are no longer
fellow Indonesians, but global peers. Whatever Singapore, China, Japan, or
America can do, we must be able to match.”
Admission requirements: a minimum score of 85 in core
subjects over five consecutive semesters, or a proven track record of national
academic achievements. Garuda Scholarships, focused on health, food security,
maritime affairs, defense, digitalization, public policy—all the strategic
sectors, all the important things, the load-bearing walls of a nation’s future.
To ensure access regardless of financial background, they
said.
And they mean it. They probably mean it. The people who
design these things almost always mean it, in the beginning, in the blueprint
phase, before the practice begins.
---
Here, then, is the paradox. Here is the thing that keeps
education ministers up at night, that has kept them up for a century, that will
keep them up long after all of us are gone:
You need both. You need Sekolah Rakyat—the free
boarding schools for children from families living in extreme poverty, the
schools designed to break the intergenerational chain, link by rusted link, so
that the child does not inherit the parent’s hunger. You need those.
And you also need the incubators. The accelerators. The
schools that take a child with a 130 IQ and a head full of fire and give that
fire somewhere to go. A 2019 OECD report acknowledged this plainly: gifted
students require targeted support. Without accelerated learning environments,
exceptionally gifted children risk losing their potential—becoming stuck in
slower, standard classrooms, their abilities slowly banking like a fire without
air.
You need both. And the money is finite. And the teachers are
finite. And the gleaming floors and the modern labs and the highly qualified
staff—all of it, finite.
So you choose. You always choose, even when you tell
yourself you’re not choosing. The OECD warns, in the same report, that high
school selectivity can drastically increase academic and social segregation.
That when budgets and premium facilities and the best teachers are funneled
into a handful of premier schools, thousands of regular public schools in
suburban and rural areas are left to stagnate.
Left to stagnate. Two words. Two very quiet, very polite,
very devastating words.
---
Cecep Darmawan, an education policy analyst from Universitas
Pendidikan Indonesia, stressed the urgent need for an equity map—a document
that would ensure Sekolah Maung branches are evenly distributed, that each
location develops its own unique area of specialization, that the incubator
doesn’t become a greenhouse for a single species.
Ima Kurrotun Ainin, a lecturer and Secretary of the
Disability Innovation Center at UNESA, offered concrete solutions to prevent
Sekolah Garuda and Sekolah Rakyat from widening the divide: a structural
overhaul of the existing system, Universal Design for Learning principles,
upgraded teacher training for inclusive classrooms, redirected investment into
existing public school infrastructure, a blended zoning system so that students
from different worlds might actually occupy the same hallways.
Good ideas. Important ideas. The kind of ideas that get
written into reports that get presented at conferences that get covered by
journalists that get read by people who already agreed.
---
The biggest lesson from the dissolution of RSBI is not that
Indonesia shouldn’t have elite schools. It never was. Elite schools are not the
villain of this story.
The villain—if there is one, if we must name it—is the assumption.
The assumption that excellence in one place doesn’t cost anything somewhere
else. The assumption that you can build a school of superior humans without
that phrase meaning something about everyone on the outside of the walls. The
assumption that the door you open for one child has no relationship to the door
you quietly, gradually, without malice or forethought, let swing closed on
another.
If Sekolah Rakyat aims to lift up the most vulnerable, and
if Sekolah Garuda and Sekolah Maung seek to accelerate the country’s
brightest—and all of those things can be true simultaneously, all of those
things can be good and necessary and carefully designed—then the challenge is
this:
Access must be based on merit, not money.
Funding must not discriminate.
Systemic quality improvements must not be the exclusive
property of the privileged few.
These are not complicated sentences. They are not difficult
to understand. They fit on a bumper sticker. They have been written down
before, in other countries, in other languages, in other centuries, by other
people who meant them just as sincerely as anyone means them now.
The hard part—the part that grinds on, the part that doesn’t
resolve in a single court decision or a single ministerial announcement or a
single press release with a hopeful photograph—is making them true.
That’s the work. That’s always the work. Not the vision. Not
the blueprint.
The practice.
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