This book, edited by Anne Suryani, Isabella Tirtowalujo and Hasriadi Masalam, provides a compilation of significant case studies by educational researchers on different themes. The editors describe this book as an outcome of a collective endeavour by various scholars and educators engaged in improving the quality of Indonesian education, and it has been published at a time when there is a trend toward research-based national policymaking.

Preparing Indonesian youth consists of an introductory chapter and three major parts, 11 chapters in all. The editors begin by inviting readers to ponder the challenges and prospects of educating youth for ‘Indonesia 4.0’. This chapter suggests that while school participation rates show commendable achievements, particularly in primary education, equal access to quality education across the country remains a challenge. Despite more than an adequate supply of teachers in Indonesia, learning outcomes are often poor. Moves to improve teacher certification have not improved teacher performance. Also, Indonesia's demographic bonus—given that the percentage of those of productive age is greater than those of non-productive age—has not been accompanied by enhancing the overall quality of education to build necessary skill sets and provide sufficient employment, and the authors are worried that the demographic bonus euphoria could become a ‘demographic tragedy’ (p. 11). While the authors do identify social and religious polarisation as a challenge (p. 2), it would have been more interesting if this is also treated as a social challenge to education that is worth further discussion.

Touching one of the most important but problematic aspects of Indonesian education, the first part consists of four related chapters on teachers and teaching. The first chapter by Anindito Aditomo presents findings on interactive instructional methods that are shown to be hardly effective in improving learning outcomes in science education at lower socio-economic status schools. While the author argues that good teaching methods should be effective for all students (p. 40), it is arguably hard to design a teaching approach that caters to the needs of students from very varied backgrounds. Andrew Rosser in the second chapter uncovers the political dynamics and conditions of teacher distribution. Elites, as he informs us, have used teacher hiring and management to acquire political gains and wealth, which presents big challenges to overcoming the problems of teacher distribution and, hence, quality. In the following chapter, Suryani's study found that student teachers’ religiosity has a positive relationship with their career aspirations. Given that most Indonesians describe themselves as religious, this finding is promising in terms of teacher education improvement efforts, although it would be more useful to see how religiosity (or other factors) influences these students’ teaching performance in schools, after graduation. ‘Out-of-field’ teachers (those who do not have teaching qualifications or who teach subjects beyond their expertise), however, as Esti Rahayu and Shuki Osman in chapter 5 suggest, have to exhaust all their resources to learn to become good teachers in a regime of expertise linearity.

Part 2, on school and institutional practices, sheds light on three different dimensions of education, namely: character education, the twin sister school programme, and gender studies in higher education. The first chapter by Wahyu Nurhayati deals with an important but integral aspect of the Indonesian curriculum, that is, ‘character education’. As she defines, character education is not designed as a particular subject, but is ‘a process of building good behaviour cognitively, emotionally, and behaviourally that is in harmony with the moral law’ (p. 109). Amidst public perceptions of the increasing decadence of youth, Nurhayati's research presents promising findings on how three different schools implement a holistic approach to character education. In the next chapter, Ahmad Bukhori Muslim evaluates a recent partnership programme between Indonesian and Australian schools. The programme resulted in benefits to both sides including teachers and students, but to say that it provided equal opportunities for students (p. 141) to access a good education is rather an overstatement for such a limited project. Moving on to tertiary education, Widjajanti Santoso and Nina Widyawati present the findings of a comparative case study of two different approaches to gender studies at the University of Indonesia, one a dedicated programme and the other diffuse and multidisciplinary, and suggests that the latter approach may be more sustainable.

The last part of the book, comprising four chapters, discusses education and social inequality in Indonesia. While Tirtowalujo in chapter 9 points to youth engagement in transnational labour migration as a factor contributing to the numbers of early school leavers, Novita Sutantoputri et al. in chapter 10 found that sociocultural factors such as religion, ethnicity and gender may have an impact on student motivation and educational outcomes. Next, Ila Rosmilawati and David Wright explore the potential of equivalency education programmes to support the educational aspirations of young in-migrants, while still allowing them to earn a living wage. The authors rightly argue that supporting these working youth's education would not only help their personal development but also contribute to national development. In the final chapter, Masalam presents an alternative of educating those from marginalised groups through the emancipatory paradigm and practices of Participatory Action Research (PAR) to enable them to build self-reliance. The findings presented throughout this chapter highlight interesting grassroots accounts of how formal schooling is often irrelevant to the needs of this group.

Overall, although this book does not offer a comprehensive review of all components of Indonesian education, it highlights existing challenges and problems that should be addressed to improve the quality of education in the country. The book, of course, does not take the most challenging recent factor—the Covid-19 pandemic—into account, given that it was produced before the crisis.