CONSTRUCTION OF DUAL CURRICULUM IN INDONESIAN EDUCATION SYSTEM DURING THE NEW ORDER GOVERNMENT

Indonesian education system, beside the fact that it has a single system with a single educational law, accommodates two different official curricula administered by two different ministries, i.e. The Minisuy of Education and The Ministry of Religious Affairs. This kind of dual system was officially initiated by the New Order Government in 1970s. Using the social constructionism as a perspective, this study tries toreconstruct the debates on educational policies during the New Order Era. While the Era has passed, the policy of having dual system remains relevant.The study is conducted using a qualitative-historical method, meaning that data are gathered from various resources using the qualitative approach combined with the historical perspective. Data are collected from various written documents as well as interviews with some resource persons. General conclusion of the paper is that the dual curriculum system has existed before the New Order government took the power. The different is that the New Order Government made the dual system official, while the previous system did not recognize religious school as parts of formal education system.


Introduction
In 1998, Indonesia experienced a major turn around in irs political system, the New Order government that controlled the councry for 30 years lost power.President Suharto, an army general that lead the governmenc during the era, stepped down from the presidem:y due to massive demonstrations that demanded a substantial change within the government.
During its 30 years of leadership, besides a number of controversial policies, the New Order government made a number of significant changes in the education sector.The changes included: significant development of the n umber of state funded schools, the reconstruction of school curricula, and the efforts of integrating Muslim schools into the national system.The latest was the most d ifficult policy to implement.In fact, a number of Muslim leaders rejected the policy and proposed to maintain the sracus quo of having Muslim schools independent from the secular system.
Realizing that they needed supports from the Muslim leaders, especially during the early years of their leadership, the government agreed to maincain the status quo.However, the governmenc insisted that the Muslim schools should change their curricula significantly in order to be recognized as equal to secular schools.Muslim leaders agreed with the government's proposition, and hence the Indonesian education system recognized dual curriculum for the same level of schooling, i.e. general-school curricula and religious-school curricula.
T he main problem with the existence of dual curricula was the equivalence of the content.The nature of dual curriculum is that each curriculum has its own strengths and uniqueness that others do not offer.In some cases, a school can employ dual curriculum and receive benefits from both sides.What happened in Indonesia was that the government recognized two forms of curriculum that offered similar levels of schooling and to similar groups of people.The question is then how the education authority ensure that the two curricula meet the rights of students to have a proper education?
In order to answer the question we need to know the nature of the dual education system in Indonesia, and to comprehend the structure of the recognized curricula.

Previous studies
The dual education phenomenon m Indonesia has been an issue that interests a number of scholars.Subhan (2012) idencified that the dual system represents two sides of Indonesian academicians.The first belongs to those raised and educated in Western or secular kinds of environment.T hey follow the footsteps of secular education founded by the D utch prior to the country's independence.The second belongs to Muslim scholars educated in the Middle East or in religious-based local educational institutions known as Pesantren and

Madrasah.
From rhe political perspective, Sirozi's (2004) view is that the co-existence of two different education systems within an education authority indicated the existence of political or ideological problems.The co-existence is an "emergency political compromise".It indicated that despite the decision concermng the country's constitution, the two groups were not in agreement about the education system.T his issue remained a major piece of homework for the Minister of Education and the M inister of Religion to reconcile so long as the dual system existed.
T he government had taken several serious efforts to narrow the gap between the two systems.One of the major efforts was the creation of a tri-ministerial joint decree in 1975.The decree, which focused on the improvement of Muslim schools, urged Madrasahs (Islamic based schools) (Islamic day schools) to improve their quality in order to be recognized equally with the secular schools.The decree, according to Zuhdi (2005), actually maintained the dual education system that already co-existed.In fact, it prolonged the reconciliation process between the two systems.Sirozi (2004) even makes the aanalysis that the co-existence of the two systems also indicated the unwillingness of the two groups to find an agreeable solution, and that the two groups were not sincere enough to find a solution.
The above studies, and many others, such as Steenbrink (1986), Dhofier (1995), and Maksum (1999), indicated that the Indonesian education system experienced dualistic standards that could not be reconciled time after time.While government regimes have changed overtime, the dualistic system remains in place, although the gap currently is not as wide.However, despite the fact that the New Order government was not able to reconcile the two systems, it was able to significantly narrow the gaps through the reconciliation of curricula.

Reseach Framework
The study is conducted using a qualitativehistorical method, meaning that the data are gathered from various resources using the qualitative approach combined with a historical perspective.The main source of the study is the Report of the Minister of Education and Culture published in 1997.Other sources include articles, books and documents containing useful information on education during the N ew Order government.
The data collected are reviewed and analyzed using a social constructionist approach on curriculum (Goodson, 1994).It is believed that any curriculum is never detach ed from the society lt serves.The contents of any g1ven curriculum somehow represent the expectation of the society.The construction of curriculum is reciprocally influenced by the dynamic of the society.Therefore, this study also identified key factors that influence the dynamic of the society.

While
there are many definitions concerning curriculum, as Schubert (1986) identifies, this paper focuses on the government policy of what to teach.In other words, curriculum in this context is understood as the wntten document or Curriculum as a Prescription, as Goodson (1994) put it.This means that while acknowledging various aspects of education and educational environment that are influential to children, this paper focuses on how the education authority responded to the needs of the society through the creation of curriculum policy.This paper identifies different curricula that existed during the given political era and makes some comparisons between two curricula produced by two different ministries.The analysis will focus on social and political influences on curriculum policy.
Indonesian Education during the New Order Indonesian education under the administration of the Indonesian government began in August 19, 1945 when President Soekarno appointed Mr. Ki Hadjar Dewantara, a prominent figure in education, as the Minister of Education.In the beginning, the government formally recognised secular education, inherited from the Dutch, as the only education system applied in Indonesia.However, education has its own roots in Indonesia.In addition to the Dutch system, other types of education had existed in the country to serve the country's young generation who, for various reasons, could not attend the secular Dutch schools.With respect to other religion-based institutions, Muslim sch ools were the biggest institu tions industry, shipping and fisheries should receive special attention.9. Health and sports education should be carried out regularly to promote harmonious development of a society that is both fit and intelligent.10.Primary school should not be charged with an entry fee.For secondaty and tertiary education a fee regulation paying system and a support avoiding learning constraint for students who come from families with financial problem.
(The Minister of Education and Culture, 1997) Following up the above recommendations, particularly points 4 and 5, the government started to pay attention to religious education.Therefore, after the government created the Ministty of Religious Affairs whose duties include managing the teaching of religious subjects in public schools and maintaining the government's relations with Muslim schools, i.e.Madrasahs and Pesantrens.However, this did not mean that the government recognized Muslim schools as part of the national education system.Instead, the government acknoweldged the existence of those institutions, but did not recognize them as formal education.Since then, the Government has continued to develop the secular education system, while at the same time the Muslim schools have continued to run their programs and catered for the demands of Muslim society.Very little effort seemed to have been taken to bring the two systems closer.
When the New Order Government took power, the relationship between the two systems started to change.The Government wanted to manage education solely under the Ministry of Education, a plan known as single roof education policy.The effort, however, was not easy and was considered unsuccessful.For vanous reasons, the Muslim schools refused to be managed by th e Ministry of Education, and insisted that Madrasahs and Pesanrrens remained under the coordination and supervision of the Ministry of Religious Mfairs.Avoiding a social clash between the two proponents, the Government maintained the status quo with several conditions (for further discussion, see Zuhdi, 2005).As a result, the dualism of educational management at the national level remained in place, noting that the government was able to narrow the gap through the creation of the standardized curriculum for Muslim schools in 1976.This marked the beginning of the official co-existence between secular and religious curricula recognized by the state.
High ***) Subjects in the highlighted area are considered as Islamic subjects ****) Most islamic schools did not have academic high schools, the most common form of islamic high school was high school for pre-service teachers.Source: Adapted from The Minister of Educa tion (1997), Maksum (1999), Yunus (1996) As the above tables show, religion-oriented subjects received more attention in Muslim schools, especially in the private Muslim schools.The proportion was even bigger when the actual study hours are included.The high proportion of religious oriented subjects can be seen in two different perspectives.First, for Muslim leaders, their existence was very important to preserve religious teachings among the believers, so that children will grow and have sufficient knowledge of their own religion, in addition to "secular" knowledge.Second, the government, on the contrary, believed that the high proportion of religious oriented subjects could lead children to understand their religious teaching only and pay less attention to other (i.e.secular) subjects.As a result, children would find difficulties when they had to integrate into wider society and especially m finding jobs m the future .This also potentially created a big gap between students of secular schools and students of religious schools.A gap that potentially became a source of conflict in the future.
The Ministry of Religious Affairs tried to minimize the gap by proposing the government curricula for Muslim schools, as the above tables show.The government curricula basically minimized the proportion of religious oriented subjects and provided more space for nonreligion oriented subjects.However, the curricula were only applicable in government funded Muslim schools, which were far fewer in number than those of private institutions.There were several other efforts that indicated that the government was continued to minimize the gap.Among them were the release of Presidential Decree No. Following the above decree, Muslim schools were required to change their curricula to improve their educational quality and to make themequivalent to secular schools.One of the major changes of the curricula was that the composition of religious oriented subjects was reduced to 30% of the curricula (Muhammad Zuhdi, 2005).Furthermore, Saleh (1976) identified three significant implications of the joint decree: First, the diploma/certificate o f madrasal1 (Mus lim Sch ool) ts considered equivalent to that of the same level at secular school; second, madrasal1's graduates could continue their education at the upper level of secular school; third, existing madrasah students could transfer to a secular school at the same level, and vice versa.
When the Ministry of Education released a set of school curricula for all levels of schooling in 1975, the Ministry of Religious Mfairs followed this and created curricula for Muslim schools in 1976.The curricula were created as a follow up to the joint decree.All madrasabs were required to implement the curricula with or without additional subjects of their own.Otherwise, the government would not recognise them as formal schooling.
As a response, there were three types of Madrasabs following the implementation of the joint decree and the 1976 curricula.The first was madrasahs that adopted the government curricula without any modification.The second was madrasahs that adopted the curricula with modification, mainly adding some religious subjects of their own without changing the prescribed curricula.The third was madrasal1s that maintained their own curricula and rejected the implementation of the government curricula.The latter were private madrasahs or pesantrens (Muslim boarding school) that were not satisfied with the government curricula.

Discussion
As a relatively young country, consisting of various ethnic groups and religious adherents, Indonesia is a fragile one.The founding fathers of the country had been able to unite those differences into one single independent country named Indonesia.It was not easy for the initial government to maintain the unity, as different groups had different agendas to promote and different ways to negotiate.Wars and conflicts were part of the era, and hence the acceptance of one group to another cannot be taken for granted.The founding fathers formulated a national ideology known as Pancasila (five principles).This ideology represented the major ideological groups, namely nationalists, Muslims, and communists.
Since the vety beginning of the country's development, the issue of religion and ideology became one of the crucial topics for discussion.Each group argued that their ideological position was the best option for the country.It was at this point, Soekarno, the then Indonesian first President, led different groups of community leaders and came up with the formulation of Pancasila as an acceptable solution for majority.
Pancasila consists of five principles: 1. Belief in one God; 2. Humanity based on justice and civilization; 3. The unity of Indonesia; 4. People's sovereignty based on wisdom and representation.5. Social justice for all Indonesians.These principles saved Indonesia from the possibility of disintegration caused by different ideological point of views.However, the challenges continued to exist.The communists and the Islamists, especially those who were unhappy with Soekarno's solution, continued to treat the country with various political distractions.Therefore, the discussion about the relationship between religion and state continued to exist.
Religious education 1s among the maJor issues that have concerned every government in Indonesia.It took years for the Old Order government to produce an education law due to, among other things, long discussions on religious education (Lee Kam Hing, 1995).The debate over the existence of religious education in public schools that sparked controversy indicated that the issue of religion remained a very important, yet sensitive, issue.This was not only true in the education sector but in other aspect's of government administration as well.
Government's decision to impose the coexsitence of secular and religion-oriented curricula should be seen from the above perspective.Having a single education system was an ideal situation, but accommodating different perspectives and interests on education was unavoidable.
There were two major issues related to coexistence of religious-oriented and secular curricula: Maintaining national's unity and the changes in society.

Maintaining nation's unity
There were two reasons why the government insisted on pulling the Muslim schools into the national education system.The first was the disintegration treat.As previously mentioned, different political and ideological groups had their own agenda to aim for.The different agendas that each group had potentially became national threats.One of the potential threats came from the Islamist political groups who maintained their argument of creating Indonesia as an Islamic state.Therefore, the government found it critically important to supervise Muslim schools, where the ideology of Islam was disseminated.
History shows that the government was unable to fully integrate the existing Muslim schools into the national (secular) education system, as Muslim leaders preferred to be supervised by the Ministry of Religious Mfairs.However, as the Ministry of Religious Affairs is a government institution, it is not difficult to supervise Muslim schools so long as they trust the Ministty of Religious Affairs.The introduction of government curricula for Muslim schools indicated that the government could ensure that the Muslim schools did not teach separation or any political agenda that could jeopardize national integration The second reason was reducing the gap between communities.While secular schools were open for evety citizen regardless of their religion and ethnicity, a lot of Muslim parents preferred Muslim schools (madrasah) for their children's education.They assumed that religious instructions were far more important than secular sciences, as they believed that they only live temporarily in the world, but forever in the hereafter.Before the New Order era, madrasabs focused more on teaching religious subjects and paid little attention to other subjects.The long term impact of this was that pesantren and madrasab graduates found it difficult to integrate into the larger plural society, especially when it came to finding jobs or employment.They could only become religious teachers or preachers in communities where they live, while the opportunities to become professional religious teach ers or preach ers were very limited.
The increasing proportion of non-religion oriented subjects in the madrasal1 curricula allowed Muslim students to learn various aspects of knowledge, skills and values.Knowledge of social and natural sciences, various life-skills, and civic values were among important things promoted through the modernized madrasab curricula.
The co-exlstence of dual curricula represented different views on the importance of education and religious education within the larger society.While the majority of Indonesian people hold a strong belief that religion is very important to their lives, their views of religious education were not singular.Some believed that religious education should be part of education in general, and even become the focus of national education, and hence the government should give more attention to religious education.Others believed that religion as well as religious education is a personal preference, and hence the government, and the public schools, should not be responsible for religious education.

Social changes
Major social changes occured not only in Indonesia but also in other countries that found independence after the Second World War.Political and economic development became the driving factors of the social changes.At the same time, Western values and ways of life started to be introduced, such as industrialization, work ethics, and democratic political systems.All of these required active participants from the society at large.In other words, people of the country were involved in developing the countly directly or indirectly.
Following the fall of the Old Order regime m 1968, Indonesia experienced a new political atmosphere.The New Order government bro ught about political and economic stability by which people can carry on their daily acnvmes m a more predictable situation.With that in mind, we should see education as an important aspect of people's lives.More parents, including Muslim ones, paid attention to formal education.Hence, there were unspoken expectations from the parents that they wanted Muslim schools to change.Steenbrink observed, " ... this is because pesantren [a form of Muslim school] can no longer accommodate the needs of modern life, where everybody needs a job, while most of the pesantrens only offer solutions for life after this life" (Steenbrink, 1986).

Conclusion
The co-existen ce of secular curricula and M uslim sch ool curricula indicated th at Muslim schools played an important role in the country's education.From the political perspective, government policy to maintain the status quo of dual curricula implied three important points.First, the government acknowledged the importance of Muslim schools, as many Muslim parents continued to send their children to Muslim schools.Second, the government acknolewdged the contribution of Muslim schools.With the limited funding for education that government could provide, Muslim schools offered accessible education for economically disadvantaged families.Third, the mission of the government was to change Muslim schools into more modernized institutions in terms of contents, methods and facilities.The failure of the government to integrate the curricula of Muslim schools into the non-religious ones did not mean that the government failed to achieve its mission.On the contrary, the government was able to secure their agendas in promoting the changes in the Muslim schools, without changing the institutions.
While it was obvious that the government played an important role in changing the curricula and the standard of Muslim schools, the role of the Muslim communities were also significant to the changes.The positive responses from Muslim parents towards the changes in the curriculum indicated that they were in line with the expectation of society.It was true that some Muslim leaders decided not to follow the Government policy, and hence their instutions were not politically recognized, but this was not the majority.
Instruction, the Minister of Religious Affairs and the Minister of Home Mfairs.This decree actually set major changes in curricula, especially those related to Islamic There were at least three different types of curriculum: general public school curricula created by the Ministry of Education, official Islamic school curricula created by the Ministry of Religion and private Muslim school curricula.The following tables compare the structure of subjects in every curriculum at three different levels of schooling before 1975.
: Journal of Education in Muslim Society, 2(1), 2015 54-60| Copyright © 2015, TARBIYA: Journal of Education in Muslim Society, P-ISSN: 2356-1416, E-ISSN: 2442-9848 34/1972 on Functional Responsibility of Education and Training, and Presidential Instruction No. 15/197 4 on the Implementation of the Presidential Decree No. 34/1972.The two regulations mandated the Minister of Education to take over education al supervision in all TARBIYA: Journal of Education in Muslim Society, 2(1), 2015 Copyright © 2015, TARBIYA: Journal of Education in Muslim Society, P-ISSN: 2356-1416, E-ISSN: 2442-9848 |55-60 different mmtstnes, including those under the Ministty of Religious Mfairs.However, Muslim leaders rejected the idea and maintained that it was the role of the Ministty of Religion to private Muslim schools.Zuhdi (2005) observed several reasons why Muslim leaders were reluctant to accept the idea of having Muslim schools supervised by the Ministry of Education.First, the Ministry of Education did not have experts on religious education.Second, there were a proposal in 1961 from the People's Consultative Assembly to merge Muslim schools with secular schools.Third, between 1965 1968 Indonesia experienced masstve clashes between the communists and Muslims and Muslim leaders were afraid that the remaining communists within the government would abolish Muslim schools if they were under the Ministry of Education.Those reasons prompted Muslim leaders to preserve the status quo of having Muslim schools under the Ministry of Religious Mfairs.Rejection from Muslim leaders made the Government reserve its decision to merge authority over Muslim schools into the Ministry of Education.As an alternative, the Government released a joint d ecree in March 1975.The main objective of the decree was improving the quality of Muslim schools without transmitting their authority to the Minis tty of Education.
After a few years of implementation, the 1975/1976 curricula were reviewed and revised to better serve students.The revised curricula were known as 1984 curricula for Secular Schools and 1986 Curricula for Religion Oriented Schools.The following tables show the composition of the 1984/1986 curricula.56-60| Copyright © 2015, TARBIYA: Journal of Education in Muslim Society, P-ISSN: 2356-1416, E-ISSN: 2442-9848 Understanding the Quran and the Prophet's traditions ( Quran-Hadits), Islamic Theology and Ethics (Aqidal1-Akhlak), Islamic Law (Fiqh), and Islamic Histoty and Civilization (Sejaral1 Kebudayaan Islam).In this way, Muslim students could have more time to study non religion oriented subjects such as Science, Math, English and Social sciences.However, students who wished to learn more religion-orientedsubjects could take classes majoring in religious sciences at high school level.
TARBIYA: Journal of Education in Muslim Society, 2(1), 2015 58-60| Copyright © 2015, TARBIYA: Journal of Education in Muslim Society, P-ISSN: 2356-1416, E-ISSN: 2442-9848 curricula can be seen from two different perspectives.The first is political intervention in education; meaning that government with its political power influenced the substance of the curricula.The second perspective 1s that government facilitated the needs of the larger Muslim society that demanded changes in Muslim schools.As an open society, Indonesian Muslim society, with influences from both the Western and Eastern countries, moved toward a new direction, which tended to accommodate pluralism and modern values.Muslim schools were forced to respond to social changes, otherwise society would have slowly ignored their presence.IndonesianMuslim schools, with government assistance m managing their curricula, had responded positively to the demands of the Muslim society.While there were a number of Muslim schools that maintained their conservative curricula and traditional ways of teaching, the majority of Muslim schools changed.

Table 1 .
The structure of Schooling

Table 2 .
Comparison of Primary School Subjects BiologySubjects in the highlighted area are considered as Islamic subjects.Source: Adapted from The Minister of Education , Yunus(1996,  2R3)

Table 3 .
Comparison of Lower Secondary School Subjects Before 1975 Subjects in the highlighted area arc considered as rcligionoriemed ~ubjecrs.

Table 4 .
Comparison of Upper Secondary School Subjects Before 1975 (Academic Programs)