Diversification of Qur’anic Schools in Banjarnegara Regency, Central Java : Comparative Study between Semi-Urban Rural and Remote Rural Settings <Article>

This paper describes a comparative study on Qur’anic schools’ educational development (changes and reforms) between semi-urban rural and remote rural areas in order to find some evidences of diversification of Qur’anic schools and its learning contents.

Qur’anic school is one of the most popular community-based education institutions in Indonesia as the biggest Muslim populated country of the world, which has important roles in providing non-formal education services for Muslim children particularly.

Qur’anic school is a part of many kinds of Islamic education, which mainly teaches Arabic language and moral education in order to achieve basic goals of Islamic education in nurturing Muslim children to master the Holy Qur’an and to be pious generation.

Recently, socioeconomic background of Qur’anic schools in Indonesia has been changed dramatically due to economic development influence even in rural area. Economic development influence in rural area has thrown up varied households, parents and children in rural area and their demand to education has been diversified.

Inevitably some Qur’anic schools had to face problems and challenges due to above diversifications of demand side, for example lack of in-service teacher trainings, decreasing number of teachers because some of them have to move to other cities for higher education or working, decreasing number of students, no fixed or un-uniformed teaching and learning materials from the government (Ministry of Religion Affairs), very limited learning facilities, and little financial support for educational services. This article tries to discuss how Qur’anic schools are diversified by using internal comparative analysis between semi-urban rural area and remote rural area.