They Know School Matters. The Schools Just Aren’t There

Reading the dropout numbers in Maluku through the 2024 BPS data

Photo by Toza Productions on Unsplash

The 2024 BPS data records something that, if we’re being honest, should keep us up at night.

Maluku has 1,248 villages and urban wards. Of those, 1,104 have an elementary school. That means 144 villages have no primary school at all. Not too few teachers. Not inadequate classrooms. No school. No building. No classroom. No chalkboard.

But that’s only the first act. Junior high schools exist in just 626 of those 1,248 villages — meaning 622 villages have none.

Senior high school? Only 274 villages have one. Sit with that for a moment. 974 villages in Maluku have no high school. Nearly eight out of ten villages in the province have no secondary education at all.

If you were born in one of those 974 villages and wanted to continue to high school, you had no choice but to leave. Leave for another village, a district town, a regional capital. Leave with everything that entails: rent, food, the cost of traveling back and forth when that’s even possible — or simply the cost of rarely going home.

In the Aru Islands, which has 119 villages, only 11 have a high school. Eleven. In the Tanimbar Islands, out of 89 villages, only 23 have one.

I often try to picture the everyday lives behind these numbers. And what I picture isn’t children who are lazy or unmotivated. What I picture is parents sitting at the kitchen table, counting what they have, weighing it against what it would cost, and arriving at a conclusion that is painful but entirely logical: school isn’t an option anymore.

We have a destructive habit when it comes to talking about dropout rates: we talk about them as though they’re a matter of poor choices.

“Young people need to stay motivated.” “Don’t give up halfway.” “Education is an investment in your future.”

None of those statements are wrong in principle. But they operate on the assumption that the main obstacle is internal — that if the will is strong enough, a way will open up.

I’ve spent enough time in the field to know that assumption simply doesn’t hold in much of Maluku.

When a child stops going to school after finishing elementary because the nearest junior high is on a different island and the family can’t afford the boat fare and rent — that isn’t a decision born of a lack of drive. It’s a rational decision born of real constraints. They did the math, and it didn’t add up. It’s that simple.

What’s even more heartbreaking is that the children who choose not to continue are often the ones who understand most clearly why education matters. They know. Their parents know. But knowing isn’t enough when there’s no school you can actually reach with the resources you have.

I once spoke with a woman in a village in Central Maluku, around thirty years old. She had stopped after junior high because the nearest high school was in the city — and that meant costs her family couldn’t cover at the time. She wasn’t bitter about it, not in any dramatic way. She just said, “If there had been a school here back then, I definitely would have continued.”

That sentence is simple, but it landed hard. Not because it sounds sad. Because it sounds so completely reasonable.

When we say “young people need to stay motivated” without fixing the access problem, we’re actually asking something deeply unfair.

We’re asking families whose income depends on the fishing season or what their land produces to absorb the logistical costs of education that the state should be bearing. We’re asking children to leave their families at twelve years old to chase something that should have been reachable from home. We’re asking them to “work harder” on a playing field that was never level to begin with. And then, when they don’t make it — or choose not to continue — we fold them into the “dropout” statistics as though the problem lies with them.

This is where motivational narratives become dangerous. Not because motivation is wrong. But because it shifts the focus away from the real question: why wasn’t the school there in the first place?

A decent education system shouldn’t require extraordinary sacrifice just to be accessed. That’s not resilience worth celebrating. It’s structural injustice dressed up in language that sounds uplifting.

There’s one more layer that makes this more complicated than just a shortage of schools.

When access to education is unequal, the consequences don’t stop with the generation directly affected. They carry forward. A child who can’t finish high school has fewer job options. Fewer job options mean lower income. Lower income means that when their own children one day want to go to school, they’ll have less capacity to cover the costs. And the cycle keeps turning.

I’ve seen this on the ground. In the communities where access to education is hardest, it’s no coincidence that poverty rates are also the highest. The two lock each other in place.

What frustrates me is that the solutions most often offered don’t touch the root of the problem. Scholarships, for instance — they matter, and I don’t dismiss them. But scholarships solve the cost problem, not the distance problem. Not the problem of there being no school. Not the problem of a child who has to leave their village at twelve and comes home once a year.

Motivational programs. Teacher training. New curricula. All of these have their place and their value. But if the foundation isn’t there, all of these programs are like decorating a house with a cracked foundation.

I’m also part of a world that often finds it easier to talk about spirit than about infrastructure. Easier to inspire than to demand accountability. Easier to admire “the struggle of children in remote areas” than to be angry about why they have to struggle that hard in the first place.

There’s a certain comfort in the narrative of struggle. It makes us feel engaged without making us too uncomfortable. We can admire, share, tear up a little, and move on with our lives.

But the 2024 BPS data doesn’t afford us that luxury. 144 villages with no elementary school. 622 without a junior high. 974 without a high school. These are not numbers that can be fixed with viral motivational content.

And my own perspective has its limits. I didn’t grow up in any of these villages. I come from the outside — observing, listening, talking with people there. There’s a great deal I will never fully understand from direct experience. There may be dimensions of this situation I’ve missed or misread.

But there is one thing I’m fairly certain of: when someone tells me that the system makes education genuinely inaccessible in any reasonable sense, I choose to believe them — rather than believe the narrative that the problem is a deficit of motivation.

Questions We Need to Answer

There are questions I think we need to take far more seriously than we have.

Why, after all these decades, do 144 villages in Maluku still have no elementary school? Who is accountable for that number, and what has actually been done to change it? Which policies have failed, and why are we still running them?

When we talk about “improving education quality in underserved areas,” what exactly do we mean? Because if the building doesn’t exist, what quality are we improving?

And for those of us working in the social and development sector: are the programs we run actually addressing this problem, or are we just circling its surface?

I know these questions are uncomfortable. But I suspect that discomfort is exactly what we need right now — more than any kind of motivation.