Fulfilling Education Rights in West Kalimantan Borderlands: Legal Harmonization and Local Realities
Published:
2026-09-14Abstract
Despite strong international and national legal guarantees, a significant normative gap prevents the substantive fulfillment of the right to education in the remote borderlands of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. This study addresses two critical research questions: what structural, administrative, and socio-economic barriers drive local students to migrate to schools in neighboring Sarawak, Malaysia, and how can conflicting layers of law be effectively harmonized to meet local needs? Employing a qualitative-prescriptive normative juridical method, this research integrates statutory, conceptual, and comparative approaches, while utilizing the mechanism of Maqasid al-Shariah—specifically Hifdh al-'Aql (preservation of intellect)—to evaluate state governance over vulnerable populations. The findings reveal that uneven teacher distribution, severe infrastructure deficits, and centralized curriculum rigidity interact in a reinforcing cycle of inequality, forcing families to choose foreign schooling that aligns better with local socio-economic and vocational realities. To resolve this systemic friction, the study builds a multi-level, contextual framework for legal harmonization across normative, institutional, and social dimensions, advocating for differentiated fiscal allocation formulas, flexible cross-border vocational curricula, and the formal integration of traditional adat governance structures into school systems. Ultimately, this research provides a vital academic contribution to socio-legal and educational scholarship by offering a structured method to bridge the top-down normative-empirical divide, providing a practical blueprint for policymakers to secure educational equity and reinforce national resilience along international frontiers
Keywords:
Border Areas; Education Rights; Legal Harmonization; Progressive Law; Social InclusionReferences
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