Ki Hajar Dewantara

Ki Hajar Dewantara, born Raden Mas Soewardi Soerjaningrat on 2 May 1889 and known by that name from 1922, was an Indonesian independence activist, writer, columnist, politician and a pioneer of education for native Indonesians in the Dutch colonial era. Born into the Javanese royal house of Pakualaman, he worked as a journalist before his anticolonial writing, notably the 1913 column If I Were a Dutchman, led to his exile in the Netherlands. While there he studied education and was drawn to the ideas of Froebel and Montessori and to the Tagore family's educational movement in India. Returning to Java in 1919, he founded the Taman Siswa school in Yogyakarta in July 1922 so that indigenous commoners could be educated, rather than only the Javanese aristocracy and the Dutch. He coined the maxim Tut Wuri Handayani, now the motto of Indonesia's education ministry, served as the first Minister of Education and Culture of the Republic, and died on 26 April 1959. He was named a National Hero of Indonesia that November.