Paperwork over Pedagogy: An Introduction for the Modern Educator
Prof. Dr. Ahmad Tholabi Kharlie, M.A. M.H.
Professor at UIN Jakarta
Around the world, the social contract of the teaching profession is unraveling. From the resignation waves in American public schools to strikes across British universities, nations are demanding unprecedented outcomes from educators while offering diminishing returns. Teachers and professors are expected to be digital innovators, character mentors, AI-literate researchers, and drivers of the modern knowledge economy. Yet, from Western democracies to emerging markets, a singular question haunts the profession: Is society honoring the human capital required to fulfill these demands?
Indonesia offers a stark, high-stakes case study of this global paradox. On paper, the Southeast Asian nation boasts an unprecedented fiscal commitment to learning. Indonesia’s constitution mandates that 20 percent of the national budget be allocated to education. In 2026, this expenditure reached a record 757.8 trillion rupiah (roughly $47 billion USD), with over a third directed toward educator compensation and professional allowances.
Yet despite these historic top-line figures, Indonesia is trapped in the same systemic cycle crippling school systems globally: an inflation of professional standards paired with a stagnation of professional dignity.
As education economists Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann demonstrated in The Knowledge Capital of Nations, teacher quality is the single most decisive factor in long-term economic growth and labor productivity.
The OECD’s Education at a Glance 2024 report reinforces this, noting that teacher salaries across member states lag significantly behind other tertiary-educated professionals, triggering severe teacher shortages across 18 major economies. Countries from Nordic Europe to East Asia are scrambling to raise salaries and streamline workloads just to keep talent in the classroom.
Indonesia’s structural challenge, however, is even more acute. While the government has integrated nearly one million honorary teachers into state contracts over the past five years, hundreds of thousands remain stranded in employment limbo. In private schools and universities, remuneration is wildly uneven.
In higher education, the disparity is glaring. A recent constitutional challenge brought by the Indonesian Lecturers Association (ADI) revealed that the average university lecturer in Indonesia earns roughly 3.36 million rupiah ($210 USD) per month.
To survive, academics are forced into "moonlighting," teaching across multiple institutions or taking on side gigs. The precious hours that should be dedicated to original research, peer-reviewed publishing, international mobility, and student mentorship are devoured by second jobs and relentless administrative compliance.
This illustrates the core policy failure: the state measures educational success by bureaucratic completeness rather than human innovation. As Lee Shulman articulated in his seminal framework on pedagogical content knowledge, exceptional teaching requires a supportive professional environment. When professors spend more time filling out compliance forms than reading literature or working in laboratories, the entire national innovation pipeline stalls.
Global benchmarks illustrate what happens when a nation flips this script. Finland transformed teaching into a high-status profession by requiring master's degrees, offering competitive pay, and granting sweeping classroom autonomy. Singapore built lifelong professional development pathways.
South Korea elevated educators to revered social and economic positions. These countries treat educators not as fiscal burdens, but as foundational national investments, aligning with Nobel laureate Gary Becker’s human capital theory that investing in people yields multi-generational economic dividends.
For Indonesia to bridge the gap between its 2045 ambition of becoming a top global economy and its current educational reality, it must pivot from physical expenditure to human investment.
This requires a clear road map: closing the vast wage gap between public and private educators, slashing academic red tape, funding competitive research grants, and recognizing that budget allocations for teachers are direct investments in national competitiveness.
The world over, the lesson is clear: a nation cannot build a first-class economy on the backs of a third-class treatment of its educators. Countries that neglect their teachers will inevitably import the innovation of others. Those that honor the minds in the classroom will design the future.
This article was published on Kompas in July, 18 2026.