Sanak Ridha,
Artikel menarik, mungkin dapat digunakan juga sebagai salah satu referensi
juga untuk menidskusikan sistem pendidikan di Indonesia (sayangnya diskusi ini
sepertinya sudah "menghilang" dari RN).
Saya (ini pendapat pribadi) melihat ada kesamaan antara Afrika di artikel ini
dengan Indonesia, yaitu: "jenjang perguruan tinggi merupakan sesuatu yang
sangat penting, bahkan mendekati keharusan"
Bedanya adalah, kalau bagaimana pemerintah dan masyarakat menyikapi
"keharusan tersebut".
Pemerintah Afrika sepertinya berusaha "bertanggungjawab" dengan cara
menyediakan secara langsung menyediakan perguruan tinggi, walaupun - karena
berbagai faktor - ternyata ini sangat tidak memadai.
Pemerintah kita cenderung hanya menyediakan fasilitas untuk jumlah mahasiswa
"sesuai kemampuan" dalam bentuk PTN yang daya tampungnya sangat terbatas. Untuk
yang tidak tertampung, Pemerintah "mempersilahkan" swasta untuk mendirikan
perguruan tinggi. Memang ini di bawah kontrol pemerintah, baik dari sisi
kurikulum, maupun sisi penunjangnya. Cuma, saya tidak punya data, seberapa jauh
pemerintah melakukan kontrol terhadap PTS-PTS, selain masalah perijinan,
akreditasi, ijin dosen, "pengaturan" ujian negara, dan legalisasi ijazah.
Sebagian mahasiswa Afrika yang kecewa dengan sistem - termasuk fasilitas -
pendidikan menjadi marah, bahkan sampai merusak.
Tetapi mahasiswa Indonesia tidak segarang itu, mereka menyikapinya dengan
"cerdas". Mereka "mengalah" untuk memilih kuliah di PTS, untuk kelas sore dan
malam (dimana dosen dan mereka sudah sama-sama kecapean karena kerja seharian).
Bahkan banyak yang "mengalah", agar kelas tidak terlalu ramai, mereka cukup
datang waktu ujian saja.
Dan banyak juga yang lebih "bijaksana", mereka cukup mendaftar di beberapa
"lembaga pendidikan", kemudian dalam periode yang sangat pendek (dibandingkan
mahasiswa yang sangat cerdas tapi kuliah di tempat lain) mereka sudah mendapat
gelar sarjana, S2, S3. Mereka juga sangat "bijaksana" untuk tidak menghabiskan
devisa negara untuk mendapatkan ijazah luar negeri dengan cara ke Amerika hanya
pas waktu "graduation", atau kalau mau lebih bijaksana lagi, wisuda ini bisa
dilakukan di hotel2 berbintang di Indonesia.
Jadi - menurut saya - ada baiknya dipikirkan suatu cara untuk menyikapi
pandangan bahwa "ijazah perguruan tinggi merupakan keharusan" ini. Apakah
dengan cara merubah pandangan tersebut, atau jika pandangan tersbut dianggap
benar, ya bagaimana mengelola (bukan hanya menyediakan) sarana untuk mendukung
pandangan tersebut.
Riri
Ahmad Ridha <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
May 20, 2007
Africa's Storied Colleges, Jammed and Crumbling
By LYDIA POLGREEN
DAKAR, Senegal, May 19 Thiany Dior usually rises before dawn,
tiptoeing carefully among thin foam mats laid out on the floor as she
leaves the cramped dormitory room she shares with half a dozen other
women. It was built for two.
In the vast auditorium at the law school at Cheikh Anta Diop
University, she secures a seat two rows from the front, two hours
before class. If she sat too far back, she would not hear the
professor's lecture over the two tinny speakers, and would be more
likely to join the 70 percent who fail their first- or second-year
exams at the university.
Those who arrive later perch on cinderblocks in the aisles, or strain
to hear from the gallery above. By the time class starts, 2,000 young
bodies crowd the room in a muffled din of shuffling paper, throat
clearing and jostling. Outside, dozens of students, early arrivals for
the next class, mill about noisily.
"I cannot say really we are all learning, but we are trying," said Ms.
Dior. "We are too many students."
Africa's best universities, the grand institutions that educated a
revolutionary generation of nation builders and statesmen, doctors and
engineers, writers and intellectuals, are collapsing. It is partly a
self-inflicted crisis of mismanagement and neglect, but it is also the
result of international development policies that for decades have
favored basic education over higher learning even as a population
explosion propels more young people than ever toward the already
strained institutions.
The decrepitude is forcing the best and brightest from countries
across Africa to seek their education and fortunes abroad and
depriving dozens of nations of the homegrown expertise that could lift
millions out of poverty.
The Commission for Africa, a British government research organization,
said in a 2005 report that African universities were in a "state of
crisis" and were failing to produce the professionals desperately
needed to develop the poorest continent. Far from being a tool of
social mobility, the repository of a nation's hopes for the future,
Africa's universities have instead become warehouses for a generation
of young people for whom society has little use and who can expect to
be just as poor as their uneducated parents.
"Without universities there is no hope of progress, but they have been
allowed to crumble," said Penda Mbow, a historian and labor activist
at Cheikh Anta Diop who has struggled to improve conditions for
students and professors. "We are throwing away a whole generation."
As a result, universities across Africa have become hotbeds of
discontent, occupying a dangerous place at the intersection of
politics and crime. In Ivory Coast, student union leaders played a
large role in stirring up xenophobia that led to civil war. In
Nigeria, elite schools have been overrun by violent criminal gangs.
These gangs have hired themselves out to politicians, contributing to
the deterioration of the electoral process in Nigeria.
In Senegal, the university has been racked repeatedly by sometimes
violent strikes by students seeking improvements in their living
conditions and increases in the tiny stipends for living expenses.
Students have refused to attend classes and set up burning barricades
on a central avenue that runs past the university.
In the early days, postcolonial Africa had few institutions as
venerable and fully developed as its universities. The University of
Ibadan in southwest Nigeria, the intellectual home of the Nobel
Prize-winning writer Wole Soyinka, was regarded in 1960 as one of the
best universities in the British Commonwealth. Makerere University in
Uganda was considered the Harvard of Africa, and it trained a whole
generation of postcolonial leaders, including Julius Nyerere of
Tanzania.
And in Senegal, Cheikh Anta Diop, then known as the University of
Dakar, drew students from across francophone Africa and transformed
them into doctors, engineers and lawyers whose credentials were
considered equal to those of their French counterparts.
The experience of students like Ms. Dior could not be further from
that of men like Ousmane Camara, a former president of Senegal's
highest court, who attended the same law school in the late 1950s. A
cracked, yellowing photograph from 1957 shows the entire law school
student body in a single frame, fewer than 100 students.
"We lived in spacious rooms, with more than enough for each to have
its own," Mr. Camara said. "We had a minibus that drove us to and from
class."
The young men in the photo went on to do great things: Mr. Camara's
classmate Abdou Diouf became Senegal's second president. Others became
top government officials and businessmen, shaping the nation's
fortunes after it won independence from France in 1960.
Today, nearly 60,000 students are crammed on a campus with just 5,000
dormitory beds. Renting a room in Dakar is so expensive that students
pack themselves into tiny rooms by the half dozen.
Firmin Manga, a third-year English student from the southern region of
Casamance, was lucky enough to be assigned a cramped, airless single
room. But six of his friends were not so fortunate, so he invited them
to share. In a space barely wide enough for two twin beds, the young
men have squeezed four foam mattresses, which serve as beds, desks,
dining tables and couches. Their clothes were neatly packed into a
single closet, a dozen pairs of shoes carefully balanced on a ledge
above the doorway.
"We have to live like this," Mr. Manga said, perched on his bed late one night.
"Two will sleep here," he said, placing his palm on a ratty scrap of
foam. "Two over there, and two over there. Then one more mattress is
underneath my bed."
Once the last mattress is laid out there is no floor space left. Mr.
Manga works on his thesis, a treatise comparing the grammar of his
native Dioula language with English, early in the morning, before any
else wakes up.
"That is my quiet time alone," he said.
The graffiti-scarred dormitories, crisscrossed by clotheslines, look
more like housing projects for the poor than rooms for the country's
brightest youths. A $12 million renovation of the library modernized
what had been a musty, crowded outpost on campus into a modern
building with Internet access. But technology does not help with its
most basic problem: it still only has 1,700 chairs. Students study in
stairwells and sprawled in corners.
In a chemistry lab in the science department, students take turns
carrying out basic experiments with broken beakers and pipettes.
Equally frustrated are the professors, many of whom could pursue
careers abroad but choose to remain in Senegal. Alphonse Tiné, a
professor of chemistry, said he struggled to balance his research with
the demands of teaching thousands of students.
"If I went abroad maybe I would have more salary, better equipment,
fewer students," Mr. Tiné said. "I studied on a government scholarship
abroad, so I felt I owed my country to stay. But it is very hard."
Mr. Tiné, 58, plans to stay in Senegal for the rest of his career. But
many educated Africans will not. The International Organization for
Migration estimates that Africa has lost 20,000 educated professionals
every year since 1990. Those who can afford it send their children
abroad for college. Some of those who cannot push their sons and even
their daughters to migrate, often illegally.
The disarray of Africa's universities did not happen by chance. In the
1960s, universities were seen as the incubator of the vanguard that
would drive development in the young nations of newly liberated
Africa, and postcolonial governments spent lavishly on campuses,
research facilities, scholarships and salaries for academics.
But corruption and mismanagement led to the economic collapses that
swept much of Africa in the 1970s, and universities were among the
first institutions to suffer. As idealistic postcolonial governments
gave way to more cynical and authoritarian ones, universities, with
their academic freedoms, democratic tendencies and elitist airs,
became a nuisance.
When the World Bank and International Monetary Fund came to bail out
African governments with their economic reforms a bitter cocktail
that included currency devaluation, opening of markets and
privatization higher education was usually low on the list of
priorities. Fighting poverty required basic skills and literacy, not
doctoral students. In the mid-1980s nearly a fifth of World Bank's
education spending worldwide went to higher education. A decade later,
it had dwindled to just 7 percent.
Meanwhile, welcome money flooded into primary and secondary education.
But it set up a time bomb: as more young people got a basic education,
more wanted to go to college. In 1984, just half of Senegal's children
went to primary school, but 20 years later more than 90 percent do.
And more of those children have gone on to high school: Africa has the
world's highest growth rate of high school attendance. Abdou Salam
Sall, rector of the Cheikh Anta Diop, said 9,000 students earned a
baccalaureate in Senegal in 2000, entitling them to university
admission. By 2006 there were more than twice that. The university
cannot handle the influx. Its budget is $32 million, less than $600
per student. That money must also maintain a 430-acre campus, pay
salaries and finance research.
Even those lucky enough to graduate will have difficulty finding a job
in their struggling economies. As few as one third of African
university graduates find work, according to the Association of
African Universities.
Governments and donors in some countries are starting to spend more on
higher education. The World Bank chipped in for Cheikh Anta Diop's
library renovation, and a coalition of foundations called the
Partnership for Higher Education in Africa has pledged $200 million to
help African universities over the next five years.
Fatou Kiné Camara, a law professor and the daughter of Mr. Camara, the
former judge, said she felt the frustration of her students as she
struggled to teach a class of thousands. When the students cannot hear
her over the loudspeaker, they hurl vulgar insults, a taboo in a
society that prides itself on decorum and respect for elders.
"They are angry, and I cannot blame them," she said. "The country has
nothing to offer them, and their education is worthless. It doesn't
prepare them for anything."
Attempts to reduce the student population by admitting fewer students
are seen as political suicide student unions play a big role in
elections, and the country's leaders are fearful of widespread
discontent among the educated youth. Senegal has created new
universities in provincial capitals like Saint Louis and Ziguinchor,
but few students want to attend them because they are new and
untested, and the government has not forced the issue.
"They fear us because we are the young, and the future belongs to us,"
said Babacar Sohkna, a student union leader. "But where is our future?
We are just waiting here for poverty."
Elizabeth Dickinson contributed reporting.
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