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This article examines the origins of community service in Indonesia's higher education (HE) system during the early years of its development in the 1950s and 1960s. Community service helped to establish a wide variety of connections between HE and Indonesian society, but it has received little scholarly attention and is virtually neglected in contemporary indicators of HE performance even though a growing priority for the system in the Global South is its connection with local communities. This article problematises the enactment of community service as the 'third mission' of HE in Indonesia and its practice during these early years. By using an historical approach and drawing on archival materials as data sources, the article argues that the enactment of community service reflected the spirit of decolonisation in Indonesian society. Decolonisation meant that Indonesia wished not only to dispense with the Dutch colonial legacy in HE but also to develop an education system that would be Indonesian in character. Although this third mission of HE was clearly embodied in the community service programme, in later years the emphasis on decolonisation in education policy was reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines United States-Indonesian cooperation in the training of Indonesian teachers during the early decades of the Cold War. Indonesia badly needed teachers but the government's efforts to train new teachers were hampered by the tremendous lack of teachers who could train new teachers. The aid provided by the United States enabled the Indonesian government to send its prospective teachers to study in the United States and to have American educationists help develop teachers' colleges in Indonesia. How far did the decolonisation of teacher training and the making of a new education standard in postcolonial Indonesia reflect the conflicting ideological undertones and the US strategy of the Cold War? This paper argues that the US-Indonesian cooperation in teacher training marked a significant stage in the decolonisation of Indonesia. Yet, it also fostered the US cultural strategy of the Cold War in Southeast Asia.

The emergence of two states in Indonesia in the aftermath of the Second World War, namely the Republic of Indonesia and the Netherlands Indies Civil Administration, instigated a war that imposed citizenship, which schoolteachers had to choose carefully. By examining the quest for professional trajectories of Dutch and Indonesian schoolteachers during the 1945–1949 period, this paper argues that expanding citizenship fostered decolonisation through the teachers' detachment from a shared dream of social mobility. The post–World War II reconstruction project, which is largely depicted as narratives of state building in many of the existing bibliographies, reflected a growing discontent in teachers' expectations for economic reestablishment at the personal levels. The teachers' detachment from a shared dream of social mobility reflected the dissolution of an imagined community where transnational cultural identities had met and melded in the early twentieth century. In contrast to the emerging historiography that emphasises atrocities and violence, this paper offers a perspective on the soft process of decolonisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper deals with the emergence of political consciousness among Indonesian teachers and students in public Dutch-Indonesian teacher training schools (Hollands Inlandse Kweekschool, HIK) during the last colonial decade up to the beginning of the Japanese occupation in 1942. Most of the Indonesian teachers and students, who pursued careers and education respectively in government schools, had initially embarked from personal expectations of upward economic mobility. Yet, in the course of the 1930s, they grew in deliberate willingness and perception to engage in a wider scope of social dynamics without limiting themselves to the area of power politics. In this paper, the manner in which these students and teachers gave meaning to their daily lives inside and outside of school is identified and analyzed as the factor that critically contributed to the emergence of political consciousness among them. Although the transformation that the teachers underwent in their view of school education was a radical leap when seen from the perspective of the Indonesiacentric historiography of the 1930s, it did not actually show a process of transformative pedagogy. The sense of citizenship that the teachers shared in the 1930s, albeit a dramatic shift from the motivation that had originally propelled them, did not reflect the notion of public education as an independent practice of cultural upbringing irrelevant to the state and state-formation ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]