The Great Depression and the changing trajectory of public education policy in Indonesia, 1930–42

Abstract

From the turn of the century up until the 1930s, public education under Dutch rule in Indonesia developed both quantitatively and qualitatively, but this expansion was interrupted, and even reversed, by the onset of the Great Depression. Focusing on schoolteachers in particular, this essay examines the trajectory of education policies in colonial Indonesia in response to the crisis, from the initial measures, to partial recovery in the mid-1930s, up to the Japanese invasion of 1942. The crisis ushered in the policy of indigenisation, which saw large-scale education reorganisation, including the substitution of European teachers with much lower paid Indonesians. Indigenisation was also a political response to the spreading of nationalist ideals through the growing number of independent schools run by Taman Siswa and the Muhammadiyah. Hence, the intention was also to transform Indonesian teachers into cultural agents who would propagate a government-formulated concept of cultural identity among their own community. However, indigenisation contributed to the gradual delegitimisation of colonial authority through the exodus of well-educated Indonesians who had been intended as docile imperial subjects.