EDUCATION AND EMANCIPATION

Western education was only being opened up to the indigenous inhabitants of the Indies at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1900, a mere 1,500 of those classified as natives went to European schools, along with 13,000 Europeans. It was hard work getting the natives there. The Dutch interpreted reluctance to attend school as meaning that ‘the natives are not lazy, but they are very careless and thoughtless about the future. The main reason for this is that they do not use their brains, because they have not been taught to do so’. By 1928, almost 75,000 Indonesians had completed Western primary education, and nearly 6,500 secondary school, still a very small portion of the total population. In a town like Blora, with its population of around 15,000 when Pramoedya Ananta Toer was born there, there was only one European school and one Dutch native school, besides the independent school in which Pramoedya’s father taught.

The aristocracy were the first to get access to Western education. Some were grateful, looking to the Dutch as examples of all that was modern. Others felt that they were being patronised. Raden Ajeng Kartini, Indonesia’s founding feminist, buried in the teak forests of Blora, was one aristocrat whose Dutch education provided her with personal enlightenment and a desire to do more for her people. Kartini was one of thedaughters of the regent of Jepara, a centre of intricate wood-carving not far from Blora. As a noble’s daughter she had to go into seclusion on reaching puberty, around the age of twelve: ‘be put into the ‘‘box’’ . . . totally separated from the outside world to which I could not return unless it was at the side of a husband, a complete stranger chosen for us by our parents’. 

While in her ‘box’ Kartini made batik and took up other Javanese pursuits, but she also developed the language skills and education that allowed her to become what she craved to be: ‘a modern girl’. Her father, despite being a mediocre regent of little ambition, had joined with his brothers in being among the first Javanese leaders to advocate wider education, catching the attention of the followers of the Ethical Policy, notably the director of the Department of Education and Public Worship. This director worked energetically to expand educational opportunities, opening up the primary school system for broader participation, and creating new high school and tertiary opportunities, albeit limited ones. Most Indonesians were seen to need only vocational education, but a small number were able to study in the Netherlands.

Through the director’s official patronage, Kartini became a close friend of his wife, Rosa Abendanon-Mandri. At the age of twenty-one, Kartini entered into effusive and sharp-witted correspondence in Dutch with Rosa, a Spanish–Puerto Rican-born feminist. The year before they began to write to each other, Kartini had also begun writing to a Dutch feminist, Stella Zeehandelaar. She subsequently met and received encouragement from other Dutch women.

Kartini’s remarkable correspondence with Rosa and Stella combined turnof- the-century sentimentalism with a clinical analysis of the situation faced by Javanese women and the steps that were needed to liberate them. In writing to Rosa she recognised the importance of the Ethical Policy’s progressive move of allowing girls to be educated along with boys: ‘It will be a giant step forwards!’ But she also knew the limits of this: ‘But . . . but what use will it be for the girls to be so educated if sooner or later they will still have to return to the traditional society, if there is only one avenue available for themto exist on this earth:marriage!’Her solution: ‘Accompany it with vocational training and then, the education intended as a blessing would truly be a blessing instead of a torture which it now is for many girls.

Kartini was a realist: ‘Ideals, we Javanese girls cannot have ideals.’ She saw that a combination of tradition and Dutch government policies kept women constrained. Not only did she recognise the need for more radical action, she knew that this must be combined with shattering aristocratic privilege amongst the Javanese: ‘the nobility must earn the reverence of thepeople, be worthy of it.’ Women must be independent and ‘of use to our fellow human beings’. Kartini challenged polygamy and established a school system for women that departed from the Dutch one, a system

that was radically egalitarian in its outlook.

Her Dutch male patrons struggled to cultivate her as an example of their good work. A leading socialist parliamentarian created an opportunity for her to go and study in the Netherlands, but the director of Education and her father decided it was not in her best interests to go. After denying her an education in the Netherlands, her family pushed her into an arranged marriage to the regent of Rembang. She died in childbirth on 17 September 1904, aged just twenty-five. Stella wrote to Kartini’s parliamentary patron that it was ‘so utterly painful to think that this beautiful and promising life sacrificed to selfish interests . . . sacrificed to the interests of the Netherlands Indies Government’. It was left to her three sisters to continue her work in setting up schools for girls. 

Kartini’s brief life inspired others from the aristocracy, and her school network spread. Consequently, Tirto Adhi Suryo began his career as a journalist and political organiser in her shadow, and one of his newspapers, Daughters of the Indies (supported by a fund created by Princess Emma, the mother of Queen Wilhelmina), was organised in collaboration with a woman who set up Kartini Schools in the West Javanese city of Bandung. This type of school spread to other islands, forming the basis of a small but significant feminist movement. The Dutch continued their recognition of Kartini’s work. Kartini and Tirto both recognised that if the whole colonial system were to be challenged, the first step would be to reform the indigenous aristocracy.

Kartini and Tirto also wanted to extend their campaigns down into improving the lives of all peoples of the Indies, but for the ordinary peasants of Blora, aristocrats were the problem, not the source of hope for a better life.

hehehe recomended dech baca ini buku, bagusnya nggak ketulungan. itung-itung rewang hari Kartinian. Title books " A HISTORY OF MODERN INDONESIA " Author-nya ADRIAN VICKERS is Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Wollongong. He is author of the acclaimed Bali: a Paradise Created (1989), as well as many other scholarly and popular works on Indonesia.