There is a particular
kind of exhaustion that does not come from working long hours or carrying heavy
administrative loads. It is the exhaustion that settles in after explaining the
same simple instruction five times to thirty children who still do not understand
not because they were not paying attention, but because the foundational skills
that would allow them to process the instruction were never built in the first
place. This is the exhaustion of teaching a second-grade class in Indonesia; a
class of seven- and eight-year-olds who have been placed in a formal learning
environment, presented with English vocabulary exercises cow, cat, dog and
asked to match words to pictures, despite the fact that a significant portion
of them cannot yet read or write fluently in their mother tongue. This blog
reflects on that reality not to condemn the children, who are not at fault, and
not to blame the teachers, who are doing their best in structurally impossible
conditions but to expose the systemic failure that places both children and
teachers in a situation that serves neither of them well.
The concept of "school readiness" has become one of the most discussed yet most misunderstood notions in contemporary educational policy. In popular usage, it is treated as a child-level characteristic: the child is either ready for school or not. Yet the academic literature tells a far more complex story. Research on early childhood education and care teachers' perceptions reveals that most educators across national contexts perceive non-academic skills such as self-regulation, social competence, and the ability to follow instructions as more decisive than academic skills in determining children's readiness for school. This is a significant finding, because it suggests that the dominant framework schools use to assess readiness, which centres on literacy and numeracy, may be fundamentally misaligned with what teachers on the ground actually observe as the determining factor in whether a child can function in a classroom.
In Indonesia, this
misalignment is acute. The country's education data paints a sobering picture
of literacy outcomes. Only approximately 25% of Indonesian students achieve
basic international literacy standards after completing their schooling, and
frequent barriers include inadequate prior knowledge, minimal interest in
reading, difficulty decoding texts, and poor vocabulary skills. When these
deficits are traced backward through the schooling system, they do not
originate in secondary school or even upper primary. They begin at the very
starting point: a child who enters Grade 1, and then Grade 2, without the
foundational literacy and language skills that would make formal academic
instruction comprehensible. Teaching English to a child who cannot yet read in
Indonesian is not a matter of choosing the right method or designing a more
engaging worksheet. It is a structurally untenable situation, and the teacher
placed in the middle of that situation is asked to achieve the impossible.
It would be convenient
to frame the problem as one of student motivation or parental involvement. It
would also be inaccurate. The root of the crisis lies in what scholars and
policymakers have identified as the deep disconnect between what the Indonesian
education system expects of young learners and what the conditions under which
those learners have developed can realistically produce. Research has found
that teaching English to young learners in Indonesia is not practically
efficient due to a lack of teacher competence, unrelated syllabi, and
uninteresting teaching methods. Yet even where teachers are competent and
methods are thoughtfully designed, the problem persists because it is not
primarily a pedagogical problem. It is a school readiness problem embedded
within a structural failure to screen, support, and adequately prepare children
before they are placed in formal learning environments.
Consider the scenario
that teachers of Grade 2 consistently encounter: a simple matching exercise,
designed for what any curriculum framework would regard as a developmentally
appropriate task see a picture of a cow, select the letter or word that
corresponds to it. The task presupposes that the child can decode symbols,
sustain attention, follow multi-step oral instructions in a language they do
not speak at home, and work with a degree of independence. For a child who has
not yet consolidated phonemic awareness in their first language, none of these
preconditions are met. The teacher explains the task to the whole class. One
group does not attend. The teacher circulates. A student asks what to do. The
teacher explains again. Moments later, the same question is asked again, by
another student, then another. This is not defiance. This is the natural
consequence of cognitive overload in learners who lack the prerequisite
scaffolding for the task being assigned to them a scaffolding that the system
promised to provide but never did.
Research on English
language teaching in Indonesian rural primary schools has identified five core
challenges: the ambiguous status of English in the curriculum, a lack of
qualified English teachers, insufficient facilities, students' negative
attitudes toward English, and broader student-level difficulties with the
subject. What this research does not fully capture, however, is the cumulative
toll these challenges exact on the teacher who must navigate all five
simultaneously, every day, within a single forty-minute lesson period.
The teacher standing at
the front of a Grade 2 English class in Indonesia occupies a position that can
be described as structurally impossible. On one side stands the curriculum a
document that expects students of this age to be acquiring foreign language
literacy, building vocabulary, and demonstrating basic reading comprehension in
English. On the other side stands the classroom reality: children who arrive
without mother-tongue literacy, without prior exposure to English phonics, and
without the self-regulatory skills that would allow them to sustain attention
through an instructional sequence they cannot follow.
Research has shown that
teachers are caught between meeting the diverse needs of children and policy
expectations, and that the ambiguity surrounding the concept of "school
readiness" itself adds significantly to this complexity. In the Indonesian
primary context, this tension is not theoretical it is felt in every lesson, in
every repeated question, in every moment when a teacher must decide whether to
continue with the planned activity or stop and re-explain from the very
beginning. Neither option leads anywhere satisfying. The first leaves learners
behind. The second means the lesson's objectives are never reached. The teacher
loses either way.
What makes this
particularly exhausting is the professional dimension of the experience.
Teachers particularly those who entered the profession out of genuine care for
children's development do not use the word "stupid" to describe their
students. They understand that children who do not grasp instructions are not
failing wilfully. They understand that poverty, family instability, limited
pre-school access, and inconsistent early literacy exposure all contribute to
the profile of the child in front of them. But understanding the root cause of
a problem does not make the problem less present in the classroom. It does not
make the thirty-second repetition of the same instruction less depleting. Research
on early childhood teachers confirms that stress not only impacts the means by
which teachers experience the school day, but also the means by which they work
with and speak to the children in their classrooms. The drain is real, and it
has consequences for the very children whose needs the system claims to
prioritise.
At the heart of this
crisis is a silence that the Indonesian education system has yet to adequately
address: the silence around school readiness screening and the systematic
under-acknowledgment of the gap between what children can do and what schools
expect them to do upon arrival. Research examining English language teaching
readiness in Indonesian elementary schools found that while students'
motivation to learn English was generally high, they face significant
challenges in pronunciation and comprehension, and classroom language use by
teachers is insufficient. The optimism of motivation, in other words, is no
substitute for foundational readiness and the absence of that readiness places
the entire burden of bridging the gap onto the teacher.
This problem is
compounded by the curriculum's design. English has had an inconsistent and
politically fraught history in Indonesian primary education. It was removed as
a compulsory subject from the national curriculum before being reinstated as a
local content subject under the *Kurikulum Merdeka* framework. The status of
English as an optional subject in the Indonesian primary school curriculum has
created significant ambiguity for teachers of English for young learners,
limiting institutional support and curricular guidance, and leaving many
teachers without a clear framework to effectively deliver English language
teaching at the primary level. The teacher who walks into a Grade 2 classroom
does not simply face the challenge of teaching English to children who cannot
read they face that challenge without a stable curriculum framework, without
adequate training in young learner pedagogy, and within an institutional
culture that has never resolved whether English should even be in that
classroom at all.
The emotional
consequences are severe and underappreciated. When a teacher has planned a
lesson, prepared materials, delivered clear instruction, and still watches half
the class stare blankly at a worksheet, the experience does not feel like
systemic failure. It feels like personal failure. Research demonstrates that
teachers' compassion fatigue and work distress driven in part by children's
challenging learning behaviours are significant job demands that erode
professional well-being and engagement over time. The teacher who feels worn
down by a classroom of unresponsive seven-year-olds is not experiencing
weakness. They are experiencing the predictable outcome of being asked to do
something that the conditions around them were never arranged to make possible.
There is a particular
cruelty to the expectation that a second-grade teacher should deliver English
literacy instruction to children who have not yet secured literacy in their
first language. Language acquisition research is unambiguous on this point: second
language literacy is substantially dependent on first language literacy. A
child who cannot decode written symbols in Indonesian, who does not yet
understand that written marks correspond to spoken sounds and that those sounds
carry meaning, is being asked to perform a cognitive operation recognise that
the letters C-A-T correspond to the picture of an animal they know by a
completely different name without the foundational layer that makes that
operation possible.
In the Indonesian
context, English is taught as a foreign language with exposure outside the
classroom being minimal, and many students reach later stages of schooling with
poor reading habits and a limited vocabulary base, making academic English
literacy increasingly difficult. When this trajectory is traced back to its
origin, it leads to Grade 2 classrooms where the foundational work was never
done not because the teacher did not try, but because the children who arrived
were not ready for what was asked of them, and the system provided no mechanism
to address that gap before placing formal linguistic demands on both student
and teacher.
The result is a cycle of
cumulative frustration that erodes the professional identity of even the most
committed teacher. A teacher who entered the profession believing that good
instruction could reach every learner must eventually reckon with the evidence
that good instruction, alone, is not sufficient when learners have not been
prepared to receive it. This reckoning is not a failure of idealism. It is the
inevitable consequence of a system that places children and teachers together
in conditions that were never designed to support either of them adequately.
This blog has not used
the word "stupid" to describe second-grade students who cannot follow
English vocabulary instructions. It never will. These children are not
intellectually deficient. They are structurally disadvantaged placed in
classrooms that demand skills they do not yet possess, in a language they have
had no opportunity to develop, assessed against standards that bear no
relationship to their developmental starting points. The failure here is not
theirs. It belongs to a system that enrols children in Grade 2 without
confirming they are literate in their mother tongue, that mandates English
instruction without ensuring teachers are trained to deliver it
developmentally, that designs curricula in ministries without accounting for
the realities of the classrooms those curricula will enter, and that measures
its own success by enrolment figures rather than by whether the human beings
inside its schools both children and teachers are actually flourishing.
The teacher who goes
home exhausted from a day of repeated, unanswered instructions is not weak.
They are the visible face of an invisible structural failure a failure that the
system has not yet found the courage to name honestly, let alone to fix.
References
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