Every three years, Indonesia’s education system goes through the ritual humiliation of the PISA tests, comparing the performance of 15 year-olds in 65 countries in reading, maths and science. Indonesia has more teachers per student than most much richer countries, and an amendment to the constitution guarantees that 20 percent of the national budget is spent on education. And yet the 2012 PISA results, released this week, show that Indonesia ranked at the bottom of the heap in maths and science, and did only marginally better in reading….

More long silence from Elizabeth. Sorry. It’s not that I haven’t been thinking about Indonesia. It’s that I’ve been focusing on just one thing: the quality of the medicines in the Indonesian market. With wonderful colleagues like Amalia Hasnida, Yusi Anggriani and Sari Dewi, we’ve been trying to figure out why people make low quality medicines, and why people sell and take them. It’s a complicated story, especially in Indonesia, but Tempo’s cover story this week highlights an important part…