They Exist, You Just Can’t See Them

Of the 206,000 children who start primary school in Maluku, only a third make it to high school.

Photo by ochimax studio on Unsplash

Of the 206,000 children who enter primary school in Maluku, only about 68,000 reach high school. A third. That’s the official figure from BPS, Indonesia’s statistics bureau, for the 2024/2025 school year.

The other two-thirds aren’t in the education system. But they’re somewhere. In the fields, out at sea, on fishing boats, behind roadside food stalls, at home looking after younger siblings so their mothers can work. They’re growing up. They’re getting on with life. They just don’t show up in any education department report.

And for years, we’ve called this the “dropout rate,” as if the children are the ones who dropped.

I once sat on the porch of a mother’s house in a village, asking why her child hadn’t continued school after primary. The answer didn’t come right away. She went quiet first, looked off in another direction, and then spoke softly.

“The junior high is on the next island over. We can’t afford the fare back and forth. And if he lives there, who’s going to help me here?”

That’s one family. I’ve heard different versions from many others: a father falls ill and the eldest has to take over the work, there’s no one to mind the younger ones, the school is too far and there’s no dormitory — or the one that’s hardest to hear but comes up the most: “They say there’s no point going all that way to school if you’re just going to end up back in this village anyway.”

I can’t fault that logic. Given their circumstances, it isn’t pessimism. It’s a reasonable calculation made by people living with very limited options.

What I can’t sit easy with is this: for years we’ve labeled these children “dropouts,” as if something were wrong with them. As if their choice, or their family’s choice, were the root of the problem. But if our education system were relevant enough, present enough, and made enough sense for the lives they actually live, would they still leave?

That’s the question we should keep asking. Not about the rate of dropping out. About why this system can’t hold on to them.

206,000 possibilities that go uncounted

I think a lot about the first day of school. The first day of primary school, I mean.

In Maluku, like everywhere else, that day usually comes with a photo. New uniform, new bag, a child’s face caught somewhere between excited and scared. And behind them, a parent who’s there with something the camera can’t capture: hope.

206,000 children means at least 206,000 moments like that. 206,000 families watching their child walk into a classroom for the first time and thinking about the future.

Our system, with all its limitations, manages to walk only a third of them all the way to high school. A third. Not because the other two-thirds didn’t want it or couldn’t manage it. But because all along the way, there are too many points where the system stops showing up and children have to choose between school and things more urgent than school.

The move from primary to junior high is the most dangerous point. Of the 206,000, only 89,000 make it onto the junior high rolls. Nearly half are lost in that single leap. And it’s no accident: junior high often means moving to another island, bigger costs, and leaving home at an age that’s still far too young.

A system designed on the assumption that every child lives within a reasonable distance of a school, that every family has a stable enough income, and that no household burden weighs more than the burden of schoolwork. That assumption falls apart in almost every island village.

I’m not against government programs. I’m not against NGOs either, even though I work in that world myself and am sometimes frustrated by it. But there’s a pattern that keeps repeating, and I’m tired of watching it.

We respond to the dropout numbers with interventions that touch the surface, not the root.

Scholarships get handed out. But a scholarship can’t pay for the boat fare when the school is on another island. Uniforms and books are made free. Good. But free books don’t replace the labor a child is needed for in the fields when harvest comes. Literacy programs run in the schools. Meanwhile the teacher shows up three days a week because transport makes it impossible to come every day.

Our interventions often answer questions that the conditions on the ground never asked. And when the program ends, the data hasn’t moved, so we build a new program with a different name and the same logic.

What rarely makes it into the design is the most basic question of all: what makes it impossible for these children to stay in school, given the lives they actually live?

Not their ideal circumstances. Their real ones.

Answer from the real circumstances, and the answer varies from village to village, island to island. In one place the problem is distance. In another it’s a family’s economic need that can’t be put on hold. In yet another it’s relevance: the school doesn’t offer anything that feels real or useful for the life they’re going to lead.

There’s no single solution to all of that. And anyone who offers you a single solution to all of it, I’d suggest treating with suspicion.

I know the numbers. I know some of the stories firsthand. I know the broad pattern. But I don’t know exactly where those two-thirds of children are now, what they’re doing, or whether they’re okay.

No system is good enough to answer that. There’s no data effort serious enough to follow the trail of children who leave the education system and disappear into a life the state doesn’t record.

And this is a bigger problem than the dropout rate. It’s about who we consider worth counting.

The child sitting in a classroom is counted. The child working on a boat is not. The child minding younger siblings at home is not. And if they aren’t counted, they aren’t in the planning, aren’t in the budget, aren’t in the program evaluations.

They exist. But to the system, it’s as if they don’t.

An article like this usually ends with an uplifting line. Something about hope, about the next generation, about how together we can change these numbers.

I’m not going to do that, because I don’t think it would be honest.

What I can say is this: 206,000 children start primary school in Maluku this year. Based on the existing pattern, around 130,000 of them won’t make it to high school. Not because they don’t want to. Not because their parents don’t care. But because of circumstances that force them to choose, and the choices available to them were never good enough.

If we’re serious about changing those numbers, we need to stop calling them “dropouts” and start asking: which system dropped out first?

The answer is uncomfortable. But that discomfort is an honest place to start.