This book offers a critical analysis on Indonesian education by drawing from various critical perspectives and theoretical frameworks to explore persistent challenges and social inequality problems in the education sector. Critical perspectives are important to reveal how education is not a neutral, mechanistic process of cultivating the knowledge and skills of future generation. Instead, it is a battleground in which competing visions, ideologies, discourses, religious values, and political interests struggle for dominance in a given society. In each of the sections, contributors draw upon specific case studies and employ critical theories to analyze power relations or to identify and destabilize underlying structures, dominant discourses, hegemonic knowledge, policies, or practices. Some authors also highlight data evidencing inequities, inequalities, or injustices in Indonesian education system. As a handbook, the emphasis on critical perspectives is useful to identify and evaluatethe 'blind spots' of dominant policy discourses and their pedagogical consequences. The plurality of critical approaches also means that this book is necessarily multidisciplinary. A unique feature of this book is the fact that most authors are Indonesian academics who bring with them tacit knowledge of practices and issues. Overall, this book enriches the literature by bringing together different disciplinary perspectives such as political science, psychology, international relations, economics, and linguistics to critically examine important issues related to education in Indonesia.

Autorentext

Zulfa Sakhiyya is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Languages and Arts, Universitas Negeri Semarang and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in Ohio State University in 2023. She is the Communication Director of the Indonesian Young Academy of Science (ALMI). Zulfa is a discourse analyst focusing on how knowledge is produced and represented, and published in the area. Her work has been published in journals such as Gender and Education; Globalization, Societies and Education, International Journal of Multilingualism, and Pedagogy, Culture and Society. Zulfa receives the Barr Mosenthal Awards granted by the International Literacy Association in 2022 for her literacy research in Indonesia. Teguh Wijaya Mulya is Teguh Wijaya Mulya is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Surabaya. He has a doctorate in education from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Informed by feminism and poststructuralist theories, hisresearch has been centered around the identification and destabilisation of dominant discourses in various domains, including higher education, gender, sexuality, and religion. His work has been published in journals such as Gender and Education, International Journal for Academic Development, British Journal of Religious Education, Asian Studies Review, and Psychology and Sexuality. In 2023 he was a visiting researcher at the School of Education and Sociology, University of Portsmouth, UK.