I n late 2019 Indonesia launched an education reform called Merdeka Belajar or “Emancipated Learning.” Led by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology (“the Ministry”), the reform sought to improve learning for all students. At the K-12 level, this goal was translated as improving students’ reading and math literacy, as well as a number of socioemotional dispositions which are essential for lifelong learning .
Merdeka Belajar was designed to be a systemic reform. The reform initiators acknowledged the complexity of the education system, i.e. that it is composed of many interrelated elements which act together to serve its functions. There is a coherence between these elements which gives it a certain inertia – a tendency to self-perpetuate its current course.
Changing a system which serves to provide access to schooling to one which facilitates high quality learning requires a reconfiguration that takes into account the interrelationships between many elements of the system.
Tinkering with one or another element of the education system in a piecemeal fashion will neither be effective nor sustainable. In this sense, Merdeka Belajar is rather ambitious. It seeks to reconfigure many elements in the education system so that they work together towards a new goal: improving student learning. The intention is to lay the foundations of self-sustaining change, one that will survive its initial reformers and different political regimes.
This paper is my account of the Merdeka Belajar reform, after more than four years of involvement in its design and implementation. In my current position, I am tasked with leading the design of the “soft infrastructure” which forms the instructional core of Merdeka Belajar at the K-12 level.
These include regulations, guidelines, models, and tools on curriculum, teachingand-learning, standardized assessments, school accreditation, program evaluation, and strategic planning. Hence my account focuses on these aspects, and less so on other equally important aspects of the reform such as technological infrastructure, funding mechanisms and budget structure, the schoolto-work link, and the subnational political dynamics which influence school and teacher management.
