Pendidikan merupakan bagian yang penting dalam hubungan Indonesia-AS, termasuk dalam kerangka kemitraan komprehensif kedua negara yang sedang bergulir. Demikian ditekankan KUAI KBRI Washington DC, Salman Al Farisi saat membuka acara Simposium Pendidikan Indonesia 2010 di KJRI Los Angeles (19/6).

Simposium ini, menurut Salman, mempunyaitiming yang tepat, karena semangat kerjasama pendidikan bilateral sekarang sangat baik dan bermanfaat bagi Indonesia. AS merupakan mitra strategis dalam bidang pendidikan, “perlu dikembangkan gagasan kreatif bukan saja antar pemerintah namun juga lembaga swasta kedua negara” ujar nya.  Simposium ini merupakan yang kedua setelah sebelumnya diadakan di tahun 2008
Sebagai empat pemakalah utama adalah Dr. Elwin Tobing (Azusa Pacific University) yang menekankan perlunya education overhaul; Dr. Juliana Wijaya (UCLA) yang mengangkat penekanan bahasa leluhur; Dr. Taruna Ikrar (UC, Irvine), menyangkut strategi pendidikan kedokteran di era global; dan Dr. Wahyu Lestari (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University) yang menekankan pentingnya inisitatif inovasi dalam bidang aeronetik Indonesia.

Pemikiran-pemikiran yang muncul untuk pengembangan pendidikan bangsa menggarisbawahi perlunya program pertukaran yang lebih intensif di tingkat internasional, perlunya perhatian pada aspek remunerasi tenaga terdidik, perhatian yang lebih besar kepada inovasi melalui penelitian dan pengembangan (R&D) serta sejumlah poin penting lainnya.
Menyangkut peran serta swasta secara khusus mendapat perhatian peserta Simposium. Dalam hal ini, peserta menyadari bahwa dengan keterbatasan angganan nasional, menggantungkan hanya pada peran pemerintah dalam masalah pendidikan dinilai sudah tidak cukup, terlebih-lebih yang terkait dengan R&D (Research and Development).
DR. Elwin Tobing yang di akhir 2009 menerbitkan bukunya “The Indonesian Dream”, misalnya, mengetengahkan data statistik trend R&D di berbagai negara. Ditunjukkan bahwa untuk AS, 70,1% sektor R&D ini didanai oleh swasta sedangkan pemerintah hanya 12,2%. Untuk Indonesia, perbandingannya terlihat kontras, yakni hanya 14,3% oleh swasta, sedankan 81,1% pemerintah. Porsi yang lebih besar oleh swasta juga terlihat di Jepang, Korea Selatan, RRC, Singapura, bahkan Malaysia, Filipina dan Thailand.

Simposium yang melibatkan akademisi Indonesia di Los Angeles dan sekitarnya Acara ini antara lain dihadiri oleh  para dosen, kandidat doktor atau master Indonesia dari Arizona, Colorado, California Selatan, Hawaii, Montana, Nevada dan Wyoming. Peserta tamu juga hadir mewakili Yale University dan Texas University in Austin.

Peserta sepakat tentang urgensi peningkatan peran serta swasta atau industri, yang bersinergi dengan pemerintah, demi memajukan iklim pendidikan dan inovasi di tanah air. Poin ini juga menjadi penekanan Konjen RI Subijaksono Sujono yang menyampaikan kata penutup diakhir Simposium.

Secara keseluruhan, Simposium satu hari yang diarahkan untuk perkuatan jaringan pendidikan Indonesia di AS itu berlangsung dinamis. Para peserta umumnya memiliki latar belakang keilmuan yang amat beragam, mulai dari bidang spesialis ekonomi makro, kedokteran, kesehatan publik, kajian agama, lingustik, aeronatika, geologi, matematika, kerobotan, hukum serta ilmu-ilmu sains dan sosial lainnya. Kombinasi keberagaman itu bukan saja menunjukkan besarnya potensi keilmuan akademisi Indonesia di AS, melainkan juga perlunya melakukan pemetaan (brain mapping) dan penyinergian kecerdasan ilmu yang ada secara kontinu untuk kepentingan bangsa.

Bagi KJRI Los Angeles sebagai fasilitator, pelaksanaan Simposium yang kedua kalinyaini bukan saja semakin memperbaiki database dan memperkuat jaringan pendidikan Indonesia di wilayah kerja, tetapi juga saling mempertautkan para akademisi, baik dosen maupun mahasiswa, sebagai kekuatan kolektif yang menjadi ujung tombak promosi citra Indonesia di lingkungan masing-masing.

Penyelenggaraan Simposium dimoderatori Konsul Pensosbud Agusti Anwar dengan kepanitiaan yang didukung aktif oleh PERMIAS Los Angeles. Seluruh peserta menilai Simposium yang memperkuat jaringan pendidikan Indonesia di AS sedemikian ini adalah sangat positif dan perlu diperluas dan dijaga kesinambungannya. (Sumber: KJRI LA)

“I have ordered an Indonesian contingent to be sent to help the people of Haiti who are victims of this massive natural disaster,” the President said after taking part in evaluating the preparation of 3,000 members of the Rapid Reaction Team for Disaster Handling (SRC-PB) at the Halim Perdanakusumah airbase here on Thursday.

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN the death toll of the quake could be “well over 100,000” with tens of thousands confirmed dead and thousands more unaccounted for. Many people
are believed to be trapped alive under the rubble after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake decimated the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince on Tuesday.

The earthquake in the Carribean archipelago has been in world headlines, with humanitarian aid coming in from countries worldwide.

Haiti’s devastation is all too familiar to Indonesia: a mammoth quake struck off the country’s western coast in 2004, spawning a tsunami that killed about 230,000 people in 14 countries — half of them in
Indonesia.

“As a country that has been itself devastated by a similar situation, we are absolutely saddened by what’s happening in Haiti,” AP quoted Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa as saying at an ASEAN meeting in Vietnam. “We call on the ASEAN community, including ourselves, of course, to do what we can do to assist them.”

Two major donors, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, have cancelled US$1.2 billion in Haiti’s debts, freeing up funds for the government to pour cash into rebuilding roads, bridges and social programs, Reuters reported.

The World Bank has also pledged an extra $100 million in aid for Haiti and said it is considering setting up a special trust fund to mobilize and coordinate international aid for the country.

Yudhoyono said urgent action was needed to help Haitians because the first hours after the disaster were critical for saving lives.

“We shouldn’t waste time in the first hours after a disaster, it’s a golden chance. If we can quickly help those who can still be saved, then a lot of our brothers’ lives can be saved,” he said.

Meanwhile Syamsul Maarif, head of the National Agency for Disaster Management (BNPB), said the agency would send 30 medical officers from the Rapid Reaction Team along with food aid to Haiti on Friday.

The Foreign Ministry has confirmed that five Indonesians working in Haiti, including two UN staffers, survived the quake and were on their way home.

On Thursday Yudhoyono remained on site to evaluate the capability of the Rapid Reaction Team, which continued conducting their emergency drill despite a heavy downpour.

The team first flew over, mapping the disaster area. Information of the extent of the disaster was sent to the base, which specified the exact location. Another helicopter was then flown in to begin evacuations, while yet another helicopter delivered food aid to unreachable victims.

“The rain has made the [training] conditions more realistic and impressive,” Yudhoyono said.

Yudhoyono said the team would have two main bases, at Halim airport in Jakarta and at Abdul Rahman Saleh airport in Malang.

source

A prize for soft moralism.

So Donald Rumsfeld was right about Old Europe.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has taken it in the neck for awarding this year’s Peace Prize to a nine-month old American presidency. There’s been much mockery of pencil-necked Norwegian academics in faraway Oslo. This is unfair.

The committee said it chose Barack Obama for his “vision of . . . a world without nuclear weapons” and for “meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting.” I’d say that completes the argument over old and new Europe. This is a Nobel of decadence.

Let’s be clear. This decadence isn’t primarily about Roman Polanski or Silvio Berlusconi’s playboy club or French culture minister Frederic Mitterrand’s adventures in Thailand. Though these are not irrelevant.

This Nobel is about political decadence.

“Decadence,” an enduring word, emerged from the Latin “de-cadere,” which means “to fall down.” Decadence stripped bare means decay.

The unanswered question at the center of this odd Nobel is whether Barack Obama admires Old Europe for the same reasons it admires him.

When it was a vibrant garden of ideas, Europe gave the world more good things than one can count. Then it discovered the pleasures of the welfare state.

Old Europe now lives in a world of unpayable public pension obligations, weak job creation for its youngest workers, below-replacement birth rates, fat agricultural subsidies for farms dating to the Middle Ages, high taxes to pay for the public high-life, and history’s most crucial proof of decay—the inability to finance one’s armies. Only five of the 28 nations in NATO (the U.K., France, Turkey, Greece and Spain) achieve the minimum defense-spending benchmark of 2% of GDP.

The effect of arriving at a state of political decadence, of no longer being able to rise in the world, is that many people increasingly discover that soft moralism is a more congenial pastime than producing answers for the hard questions. As when David Cameron, the Tory leader and likely next British prime minister wonders: “The insatiable consumption and materialism of the past decade; has it made us happier or more fulfilled?”

This isn’t to say that soft moralism is about nothing. But when matters such as climate change become life’s primary concerns, it means one is going to spend more time preaching, which is easy, than doing, which is hard. One thinks of Nobelist Al Gore’s unstoppable sermons.

Among the hardest questions Europe faced after World War II was the placement of anti-Soviet Pershing missiles on Europe’s soil in 1983. Led by Helmut Kohl and Maggie Thatcher, Europe did something hard: It overcame its pacifists. A decade later, with the siege of Sarajevo, old Europe came to understand that making the hardest decisions was now beyond its reach.

Current hard questions include Pakistan and Afghanistan. Darfur is a hard question. Where to hold captured terrorists is a hard question.

Americans heard often the past four years how much Europe “hated” us because of that most complex of hard questions, the Iraq war. Unpopular wars cause bad feelings to be sure, but past some point Europe’s antipathy toward the U.S. over Iraq began to sound a lot like moralistic decadence. It is a neurotic resentment of a superpower merely because it possesses the resources to do something Europe can no longer do, for good or ill.

AP: Norwegian Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland

What we are in the process of discovering is just how much President Obama’s worldview coincides with that of the continent that claims to have seen itself reflected in him and its Peace Prize.

Mr. Obama is at a crossroads in his presidency. As George W. Bush departed the White House, he said his successor would one day arrive at the need to make a decision that made clear the reality of being the American president. That moment has arrived. It is the pending troop-deployment for Afghanistan, a very hard decision.

After that, Mr. Obama will go to Oslo Dec. 10 to receive the Prize itself. That will occur in the middle of the Dec. 7-18 United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen, whose goal is among the explicit reasons why Mr. Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize.

Between Afghanistan and Oslo, we’re going to get some clarity about the Obama presidency.

Perhaps the most intriguing onlooker to this education is European Nicolas Sarkozy. On his good days, France’s president seems aware of the political and economic decay he has inherited. So it was striking at the United Nations last month when Mr. Sarkozy said that Mr. Obama “dreams of a world without nuclear arms.” Then, describing Iran’s nuclear threat, he said, “At a certain moment hard facts will force us to make decisions.”

By “us” he means that the U.S. must lead. In the West, only the U.S. president can still make decisions based on hard facts rather than recede into soft moralism. The day that is no longer true, the U.S. will finally deserve a decadent Nobel.

Source: Wall Street Journal ]]> http://www.permiasla.com/dummy-text-2/feed/ 0