Jakarta - Malay Studies and Cultural Development chief, Mahyudin al-Mudra, said Indonesia is lacking in story books for children. “There are only a few of them,” Mahyudin said during the launch of the book 366 Tales of People Across the Archipleago in Jakarta yesterday. The lack of quality story books, Mahyudin added, tend to lead children into watching television. Meanwhile, a survey conducted by the Science and Aesthetics Foundation, Indonesian Television Journalists Association, the TIFA Foundation, and the Communication and Informatics Department, showed that the quality of television entertainments is very low.
The survey was carried out in March and October 2008 in 11 big cities in Indonesia, namely Jakarta, Medan, Bandung, Semarang, Yogyakarta, Surabaya, Makassar, Denpasar, Batam, Pontianak, and Palembang. The programs surveyed were 15 shows which, based on AGB-Nielsen Media Research, had the highest rating during the first week of March and October 2008. The 15 shows included five regular news programs, five talk shows, and five entertainment shows. The result indicated that 45,8 percent of the respondents said the entertainment programs were very bad, 36,3 percent said they were average, and only 15,6 percent said the programs were good.
The cultural analyst and director of the Adicita Karya Nusa Publishing Company said “366 Tales of People across the Archipelago” contains multicultural educational topics. He said multicultural education is a must, considering Indonesia consists of many varied cultures. Children must be introduced to the reality of the diverse culture at an early age. The book, he said, took three years to finish and is written by 23 authors.
As many as 2.500 from 3.00 stories were gathered and sorted based on their themes. The 1.008-page children`s book has even been noted in the Indonesian World`s Record Museum as the thickest children`s book in Indonesia. The book will be translated into English in the near future, Mahyudin said. REH ATEMALEM SUSANTI
Source:
http://www.tempointeractive.com (December 11, 2008)