When my wife and I decided to send our kids to private schools, we consciously understood what sort of future would it be for them. If they want to pursue their higher education abroad, getting a normal scholarship is not going to be easy, no matter how good the qualification is. That is the reason, I prefer using the term independent school, rather than private school. The idea of being independent must properly embedded right from the beginning.
We create an independent culture, measuring our kids’ progress based on their daily performance rather than the examination’s result and inter classroom ranking. When Opah asks “what number did you get this year?”, we teach our kids to confidently answer “we don’t have numbers at school!”
We create an independent idea about education, believing our kids are not future job seekers, but job creators. They receive education to become men and women with full meaning of being human with perfect humanity, the people of Adab, who understand meaning and act based on this understanding.
But most importantly, we must also create an independent financial sustainability, not to rely on sponsorship, or loans, but to prepare towards that, and to seek cheaper opportunities which are never synonymous to lower quality. We even have many countries which still offer free education, like Germany and Austria, or full sponsorship like Saudi Arabia and Turki, as well as affordable expenses like Indonesia, India, Philippine and many other similar countries.
The only thing is, our kids who are studying at these independent schools, they must be survivors. They can be thrown alone at Konstanz, and they survive. They can independently study Sastera Melayu at Gajah Mada, or Hadith in Delhi, Medicine in Makassar or Sociology in Istanbul, without the craving of wanting to get the 1.5m Euro to study dentistry in West Europe.
From now, our kids can learn and practice entrepreneurship, write books, learn foreign languages, and experience student exchange program, as we hope to offer at KMSS.
Let us maintain the culture of independent.
Work hard, pray hard, and keep smiling.