"But these girls are wearing shorts, that’s not polite," was the response from the Department of Education officials when they first visited the Suta Dharma School in Campuan, Ubud. The school, opened in 1997, now boast uniforms with skirts (and shorts), but in its early days the parents’ main concern was simply keeping the school running.

The cries of Guru! Guru! (Teacher! Teacher!) bounced off the walls and filled the air as the children, powered with the excitement and joy of learning, competed for attention. The joy of education is a shared commodity, and one that seems to be bringing out the best in both staff and pupils.

Some critics have accused the New Order (Suharto, ed.) regime of using education as a method of social control. They claim that while the Indonesian system of education has delivered basic education to even the poorest of villages, it has done so at the expense of analytic thought, creativity and initiative. Instead, the passing on of expedient history, unquestioning obedience and the methods of ranking and testing, has created a generation of people with calipered minds.

"I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t found the Suta Dharma school. For me the Montessori system means freedom to learn and to experience. The traditional Indonesian model is one where the teacher is active and the children just listen with arms on the desks," said Dayu Sriami, the head teacher and Director of Education, while mockingly impersonating a stern disciplinarian. "Here the opposite is true, the children are active, and the teachers are the medium by which they learn. I was so excited when I first came here. I couldn’t wait to translate all the materials into Bahasa Indonesia. I made many of them myself, as the cost was too high and the school didn’t have the money."

Dayu Sriami’s look intensified. "We do not use ranking here," she asserted, referring to the misguided method used in the mainstream Indonesian education system to motivate children to do better. Instead, however, it tends to produce smugness and laziness among highly-ranked children (known as ‘10s’) and cowering under-confidence among children who are assigned low ranks (or ‘3s’). As education can be regarded as the essence of human growth and development, the basis from which we interpret and manipulate our world, the richness and autonomy of the learning experience is really the determinant of a nations future capacity. I thought about my own education, and how while forgetting most of the facts, I value the intellectual frameworks and problem-solving capacities that I had received.