Jakarta (The Jakarta Post: (28/11/07) The government will encourage teachers to take their skills to remote areas in Indonesia by providing them with a number of incentives, a senior education official said Tuesday. "We challenge teachers to educate people in remote areas. The government will provide a special allowance in addition to their monthly pay for teachers willing to do this," said secretary to the director general for quality development of education practitioners at the Education Ministry, Giri Suryatmana.

Giri was speaking at a press conference at the 2007 Indonesian Teachers Conference. The two-day national conference, funded by the Sampoerna Foundation Teachers Institute, the Education Ministry and the Provision Foundation, invited 1,000 teachers from across Indonesia to share their experiences on Tuesday and Wednesday at Balai Kartini in South Jakarta.

Giri told teachers and reporters that "a good teacher is not born but made" and restated the government's commitment to achieving "professional and prosperous educators". "The government will give a higher priority to teachers in remote areas for access to scholarships and teacher development trainings," he continued. There are currently 2.7 million teachers in Indonesia — the largest number in ASEAN — but most of them are concentrated in large cities. Ideally, each teacher should be responsible for teaching only 15 students, but the unequal distribution of teachers in Indonesia has made this impossible to attain.

A mathematics teacher from state senior high school SMAN 7 in Manado, South Sulawesi, Marly Pandelaki, told The Jakarta Post that he was pleased with the government's challenge. "It's about time that the large disparity between central and local education was reduced. I have always thought that the government should devise a policy to ensure teachers are equally distributed in Indonesia," said Marly, who was a finalist in the national best teacher competition in 2004.

He praised the conference, which was first held in 2006, saying that he had gained much from attending the first day. "When you're teaching a subject like mathematics," he said, "there is a need to always improve yourself as a person. The subject is, obviously, boring, so you shouldn't be.

"The committee expected that the conference would help improve the competence and professionalism of Indonesian teachers in the coming years. "We hope that after attending the conference these teachers will have a higher bargaining position in their professions," said Kenneth Cock, the director of the Sampoerna Foundation Teacher Institute.He added that this year's conference explored the correlation between education and the community, with topics such as community-based teacher development programs and educational community development.