Teachers' Union: Ministry Of Education And Culture's Policy On Face-to-Face Learning Is' Laziness To Think ', Seeking Breakthroughs

JAKARTA - The Federation of Indonesian Teachers' Unions (FSGI) assesses that several policies issued by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology during the COVID-19 pandemic have not been optimal in overcoming the crisis in the education sector.

"The Ministry of Education and Research and Technology seems to be at a loss for dealing with obstacles to Learning From Home (BDR) or Distance Education (PJJ) during the COVID-19 pandemic, although a series of policies have been made, until April 2021 it seems that it has not shown the results as expected. In fact, the dropout rate has increased. and students from poor families are hardly served because of the absence of online tools", said FSGI Secretary-General Heru Purnomo in Jakarta, quoted from Antara, Sunday, May 2.

The mistake from the start was that the Ministry of Education and Culture made BDR an online PJJ that relies on the internet, even though digital disparities are very wide between regions in Indonesia.

Furthermore, the BDR program was ineffective because it was too dependent on the internet so that the policy made was the provision of quota assistance to educators and students. However, the provision of quota assistance was not accompanied by a mapping of the various quota needs.

In addition, students from poor families who do not have devices and areas that are not connected to the internet network cannot enjoy internet quota assistance and they are still not served by PJJ.

Then, the failure to deal with the bad effects of BDR or PJJ actually relaxed the SKB (Joint Decree) 4 Ministers which will open face-to-face schools simultaneously in July 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic which the government cannot control yet.

As if implementing Face-to-Face Learning (PTM) is a powerful way to overcome educational problems during a pandemic.

"Even though this is just" laziness to think of looking for other breakthroughs "and can cause other problems, for example, the explosion of the COVID-19 case if the opening of schools is not accompanied by readiness and layered protection for students and educators. There have been many cases of COVID-19 after the education unit held PTM", he said.

Educational policies designed to overcome PJJ are not successful because they are only general in nature and tend to be uniform without seeing the wide gaps and do not take advantage of the potential that the regions have that can be used to overcome the deadlock of PJJ online.

"The role of school principals in overcoming PJJ is not able to manage schools in a specific way according to their respective conditions. So teachers who are confused about serving PJJ do not get assistance, support, and solutions from their Principals", said Deputy of FSGI Mansur.