Vocationalizing Education: The Dangers of Link-And-Match Paradigm for the Students’ Future

This chapter aims to illustrate how and why market-driven education through link-and-match paradigm endangers students’ futures in the Indonesian context. To meet market demand, the government endorses such policies to vocationalize various types and levels of education. In vocational education, it is done by proposing vocational school revitalization programs; while for general education, it is through the enactment of competency-based curriculum. By critically analyzing these policies, I argue that vocationalization of education endangers students’ future in at least three ways. First, there is a tendency that vocational schools would perpetuate inequity because the main design of the curriculum only gives the students technical skills and narrow or limited knowledge. Second, the design and implementation of competency-based curriculum at schools reduces the main purposes of education into technical skills or competencies. Thirdly, the content of the curriculum is still overloaded, to the extent that teachers are preoccupied with too many administrative tasks, and double standards of competency assessment (both from the school and the Vocational School Certification Agency). A more balanced curriculum design—between knowledge and skills—will be appropriate to reform the existing curriculum that overly emphasizes skills. Education should not merely produce skilled workers, but also transform society to be more democratic, humanist, and socially just.