Limits of bureaucratisation in Islamic education

Indonesia has become a laboratory for testing the proposition that religious education can be made accountable to standard operating principles defined in bureaucratic formulas. Since the founding of the Ministry of Religion in 1945, the Ministry has created an Islamic education system that will enable Muslims to compete in the diverse fields of contemporary life. In order to assure the public of the value of this education, it has partially replaced the venerable figure of the kiai–the scholar whose competency and excellence are validated through scholarly and kin-based genealogies–with rationalised processes. For many Muslim educators, however, this bureaucratised education is failing to produce graduates with Islamic moral qualities. In the late 1990s, this critique motivated the establishment of ‘university colleges’ (ma’had al-jami’ah) in the Ministry’s universities. These replicate the pedagogies of the pesantren, the boarding schools that have provided Islamic education since long before the Ministry existed. According to these educators, the pesantren, kiai, and associated pedagogies provide guarantees of moral education that are lacking in the rationalised domain of the Ministry’s universities. The emergence of the colleges is contextualised in the continuing history of the bureaucratised integration of Islamic education.