Upgradation Of Education Quality In Urban And Rural Areas Through Student Exchange in The Earlychildhood Education Level

By :

Utari Nanda Rismi

Mahasiswi SI PGPAUD UNP

Education is long-term human resource investment which has a strategic value for human culture viability. Therefore, almost all countries addressed education variable as an important thing and compete to increase education quality in context of country’s development. Also, Indonesia had been put education as one of important and primary thing. This can be seen in the commencement of Indonesian Constitution (UUD 1945) of fourth paragraph which is explain that one of national purposes is to educate country life.

Implementations of education in order to increase human resources becoming continues as they are mandated in the commencement of Indonesian Constitution. National educational systems should able to secured an equalization of educational chance, increased the challenge up to locally, nationally, and globally life changes. However, there’s still inequality in the community, one of them is inequality between educational quality in urban and rural areas.

For them who are living in big cities, education is not a luxurious thing. They are obligated to enter school into twelve grades minimum/graduated from high school to get a job. If parents have enough money, they can continue to enter colleges such as DIII, bachelor, or even magister. Frequently, school function is just to alleviate illiteracy. When literacy is get, child’s duty to go to school is over. So as, it can be expressed that few factors that caused an inequality of education in urban and rural areas are disparity in human resources, disparity in infrastructure and accessibility, improperly in learning processes between conditions and community’s needs, and weakness in national education system.

To overcome disparity between urban and rural areas, government had been stimulated it by established decentralization policy in education, which is consolidate in regional autonomy regulation (UU No. 22 of 1999) and revised in UU no. 32 about regional government. This regulation is striving for regional autonomy and democratic insight, including educational implementation. This regulation also affected in national educational system which is altered from centralization to decentralization. Decentralization in educational implementations is also realized in UU no. 20 of 2003 about national educational system.

But, it’s impossible for the government to work alone to increase and distributed education’s quality in urban and rural areas. Rural education is impossible to develop optimally without participation from all of people’s components. Then, the government should be able to mobilize human resource by doing early childhood students exchange  from urban to rural area. Cause education begins from the moment the child is brought home from the hospital and continues on when the child starts to attend playgroups and kindergartens. The learning capabilities of humans continue for the rest of their lives but not at the intensity that is demonstrated in the preschool years. With this in mind, babies and toddlers need positive early learning experiences to help their intellectual, social and emotional development and this lays the foundation for later school success.

This concerning is also supported by Minister of Education Moh. Nuh, and remind that in education world there is no discrimination that caused by territorial disparity, between urban and rural, and between rich and poor, which made someone to lose his/her right to become educated. This should be committed and implemented promptly, so every citizen’s right to get proper education can be realized, and assist educational institution to consider the curriculum and methodology that economically efficient (Hanakristina, 2010).

Through student exchange program, started in early childhood education until high school, from urban to rural and reverse, it will mutually sharing and completing for quality of education. Because Early childhood is a crucial stage of life in terms of a child's physical, intellectual, emotional and social development. Growth of mental and physical abilities progress at an astounding rate and a very high proportion of learning takes place from birth to age six. It is a time when children particularly need high quality personal care and learning experiences. Every student from rural area can get an experience in accesses and facilities from big cities education, also student from urban area can make an experience of hospitality and the limited situation of rural education. Beside, through student exchange from urban to rural, education can facilitate every student to share their experience and knowledge, so the output that expected from the implementation of student exchange is increase and equalize educational quality in urban and rural areas in this country.