REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA - Vice President Muhammad Jusuf Kalla said the selection of teachers should be more stricter than the selection of Civil Servants (PNS) more so because of the greater responsibility in the teacher's’ role to educate the nation.

“A teacher’s duty is to educate the nation and thus a teacher should be more intelligent than the students. Therefore, test for teachers should stricter than others," said Jusuf Kalla in a seminar organized by the Indonesian Teachers Association (PGRI) in Jakarta, Friday (27/5 ).

The Vice President added because of the severity of a teachers’ task, teachers can not directly be appointed honorary civil servant (PNS) teachers. Instead, they have to go through a selection pattern. "For the sake of the quality of education, we can not directly lift honorary teachers as civil servants. If local government later on recruited many honorary teacher then made them all civil servants without taking into consideration of the quality," he said.

According to him, the teacher job is not similar to those of the municipal police whose job it more to restrain and control. "Teachers  are originally not al police straight away. But the nation," he said.