If citizens really had a choice, they would likely send their children to schools that do not follow the national curriculum. This would protect their children from exposure to what experts have referred to as a large waste of time, culminating in the recently concluded absurdity that are the national exams.

This is what we have to show on National Education Day, which falls on the birthday of renowned educator Ki Hajar Dewantara. Teachers in Medan, North Sumatra, seeking protection from the national human rights body after going public about colleagues helping students cheat on the national exams. In Padang, West Sumatra, 78 students walking out of the exams after witnessing teachers slipping notes into the pockets of students, who also wrote down answers scribbled on toilet walls.

This annual parade of dishonesty by teachers will occur again next year and the year after that. The main reason being that all schools want students to graduate, at any cost, even if they are poorly equipped to meet the benchmarks set in the capital.

Despite repeated arguments that evaluating students should be left to the educators who most understand them, the bureaucrats remain adamant about keeping their hold over education.

Officials keep defending the national exam system, yet we do not have better qualified students. Not surprisingly, the country's "top" institutions never rank in international – no, try regional – education lists.

The national exams are just one on a long list of chronic problems in our national education system, all of which point to our love of showing off and of symbols.

Do our officials have any reason to be proud of the system each time Indonesian students win academic competitions such as the Physics Olympiad? As the public has come to know, we owe such successes more to the hard work of the organizers-cum-science educators who nurture the students' excitement about physics.

In a picture that appeared in this newspaper the other day, an official was grinning as he displayed textbooks that had been seized in Kupang because of their "communist" content.

It seems there are better things officials could be doing with their time than worrying about pictures of Russia's Mikhail Gorbachev.

On Tuesday, the Constitutional Court again underlined that under the Constitution a mandatory 20 percent of the state budget must be set aside for education.

Never mind whether the court really has the power to mandate that 20 percent of this year's state budget be allotted for education; the decision was met with a common shrug from officials and a public that knows such a bold move will never come to pass. A shrug that takes for granted the national failure to go beyond bold words and actually invest in educating our children.

Listen to the flimsy praise offered by Education Minister Bambang Sudibyo for this year's "improved" conduct of the national exams. Not that regional disparities were taken into account, or the scores of schools where teachers are not even basically equipped to prepare students for the English and math sections of the exam.

In an era recognizing autonomy – and hence the crippling potential of centralization – the government still finds it best to cling to uniformity, the simple solution of the old. Idealistic educators continue to remind us the true goal of education is the molding of both intellect and character.

Many know by heart the three principles of education, voiced by the above Ki Hajar Dewantara: to give guidance, to encourage initiative and to provide an example. Ironically, these words merely join all the others our children must memorize, just in case the question comes up on the exam.