Unspun

Indonesia has just won four golds and one silver at the 37th International Physics Olympiad in Singapore. One of the students was also the Absolute Winner at the Olympiad. In short Indonesia has the best young minds in physics in the world.

The man behind this feat of intellectual conquest is Prof. Johannes Surya, a bespectacled, unassuming character who’s been helping to catapault Indonesia to the top of intellectual contests.

I caught up with the Prof at a lunch hosted by the Moodys today at Four Seasons Apartment, to welcome back the Olympiad team and to say thank you to the team for doing Indonesia proud.

What he had to say is both intriguing, inspirational and sad at the same time. There are, apparently as many as 15 million young Indonesians with IQs of 150 and above. For some reason most of these students are not from Jakarta. In the past the Prof has found them in Maluku, Papua and Central Jawa.

Once he finds them he gets them to Jakarta and trains them. The training program is, literally, Olympian. Together with an ex Olympiad participant, Andhika, who’s had the rare pleasure of turning down Princeton for ITB, the present winning team of students were trained for eight months leading up to this week’s Olympiad.

The training apparently consists of incessant drills on questions that would make others numb with incomprehension. Us adults at the lunch looked at one of the questions asked of the participants in previous years. Suffice to say that we hummed and hawed and changed the topic lest we betray our ignorance.

But what makes Prof Yohanes’ story sad is also the very little government support the participants received from the government all this time. The training took 8 months and most of this was done on the Prof’s own resources as well as that of well wishers. The government apparently provided support only for two months’ training.

So the bottomline is this: you have all this potential and brain power in Indonesia but the government is doing very little to harness it. Indonesia has so many negative stories and when they stumble on one of the few potentially good stories to tell the world, they try to kill it with benign neglect and platitudes.

The professor is undaunted though. He is devising his own education curriculum that, he says, will be asyik, muda dan menyenangkan. Good on him. he deserves support.

If there are any corporations out there who want to get involved in boosting education in Indonesia as a Corporate Social Responsibility initiative they should certainly contact him. He has a few brainy ideas about education.

In the meantime, then Prof’ll be off to Seroi, Papua, shortly as he’s heard that there are many brainy students there.