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Optimism and Education: The New Ideology of Development in Indonesia

2014; Routledge; Volume: 45; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00472336.2014.978352

1752-7554

Paul K. Gellert,

Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare

AbstractAbstractBased on ethnographic field research conducted in Jakarta, this article argues that there is a new ideology of development in Indonesia that is cosmopolitan, nostalgic and individualist. To understand the new ideology, a historical sociological perspective is taken to examine the nationalist period of anti-colonial struggle, the state developmentalist period of Soeharto’s New Order, and the neoliberal period since 1998. Two interrelated arguments are made. First, the ideology of development in Indonesia has changed from earlier nationalist understandings of Pancasila to a cosmopolitan neoliberal ideology based in a nostalgic nationalism. Second, a modernist Islamic perspective on secularism and Islam both supports and is supported by this ideological shift. These arguments are illuminated through two examples of the advance of cosmopolitan neoliberal ideology: optimism and education. Optimism is focused on individual integrity to redress Indonesia’s problems with corruption. Education is offered by optimists as the escalator to development. Empirically, the Indonesia Mengajar programme of sending young university graduates to teach elementary school in remote parts of the country is examined for its neo-modernisationist assumptions. The article concludes that this dominant ideology abandons earlier solidaristic forms of nationalism and holds little hope for addressing the vast structural inequalities in Indonesia.Key Words: IdeologyIndonesiaeliteseducationindividualismneo-modernisationneoliberalism AcknowledgementThe author gratefully acknowledges comments from the reviewers and Kevin Hewison, which pushed the article towards its current more forceful version. Funding for the research was provided by a fellowship from the J. William Fulbright Foundation/International Institute of Education. Earlier versions of this article were presented and useful comments and questions were raised at the colloquium series of the Department of Sociology at University of Tennessee in February 2012, at the annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) in Toronto in March 2012 and at Paramadina University in June 2012. The author gratefully acknowledges colleagues and graduate students in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee, and fellow panellists at the AAS, Cari Coe, J. Thomas Lindblad and Andy Kipnis. Finally, he is especially grateful to his hosts and colleagues at Universitas Paramadina, Anies Baswedan, Wijayanto, Totok Soefiyanto, Aan Rukana and others. They may disagree with the content and arguments in this article, but they were gracious and supportive during my time at the “little giant” university. All remaining errors are mine.