Indonesian education and a misleading paradigm

Khairil Azhar, 18 May 2009

Imprisoned teachers are likely to be less exciting issue nowadays as the national political feast is heating up, not only for the common people but also for the elites. The issue is probably something anxious and threatening only for their relatives or the government officials involved in imprisoning them or just precisely defending them. In fact, they have been there however because of the policies decided by the political elites and carried on the name of the people’s demands.

Beside of being sided by the political stir it is not really strange related to the education paradigm embraced by the current incumbent. Based on the story appeared at Kompas, Wednesday, 14 May 2009, the incumbent vice president seems to abandon the fact that national exams are threatening the teachers integrity and honor because they are eventually positioned in a dilemmatic duty of having to enhance the education quality in a hand and their regional prestige as well in the other one.

According to the next president candidate, national exams have been decided as a compulsory after a consideration of how Indonesian education badly left, for instance if it is compared to Malaysia and the Philippines. Without national exams many students tend to feel free and involve in students violence instead of learning. “They feel an ease not to study because of the certainty to pass without learning.” This was an answer given by the vice president to the questions asked by the teachers united in PGRI (Indonesian Teachers Union) when he “visited” Gedung Guru on Thursday, 14 May.

The short explanation however shows the tendency of applying an instant medication to many kinds of disease suffered by Indonesian education. It is like what was done in the story of Faust who was trying to find out a panacea in Goethe’s allusion in order to remedy any kind of diseases. The universal remedy is of course a mission impossible by any chance. Being left behind or students quarrels are only visible symptoms of many possible acute illnesses which are likely to be incurable in a short time or with a single move.

If the policy of national exams was intended as the first step to cope with the seen problems the government should have been wronged by a hurried assumption made prior to the implementation. It is then like an antivirus that has been bearing and spreading new stronger mutants. The policy, regardless the questionable success so far, on the other way has born many more complicated tendencies, such as the abandoning of student non-mathematic and linguistic gifted intelligence, the special need students, high cost education, and etcetera.

As students violence or lack of motivation in learning are two classic problems laid on the applied part of the education paradigm, the spontaneous answers given by the vice president also seemed to be irrelevant and out of bounds. On another word, he did not touch the underlying bricks causing the education underdevelopment and merely caught the tip of the huge iceberg.

And education is actually a process of building and decorating a big building. The government, in this case, is only caring with the appearance and good look. All efforts and forces are spilled all over the front side and face while the infrastructures left rotten and repaired by patching. If student violence is really a concern, for example, why does not the national educational department focus on the effort of facilitating and providing units of student activity at schools in a massive and systematic program rather then wasting all the water supply on the drought called national exams?

The vice president also said that the policy had been an alternative to overcome the imbalance of output quality among all regions in Indonesia. Certain students from certain regions pitifully are unable to enter Universitas Indonesia (UI), Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) and any other favorite universities. “The imbalance and gap is latently resulting a danger to the nation and even disintegration is likely to occur,” the Vice President went on.

But is education only about desired input and is not mattering the process which actually guaranteeing the output? Does the cognitive result represent a student’s performance, talent, and intelligences? Will he live a life with only certificates? Did Thomas Alfa Edison have school certificates? Did Agatha Christie pass all the tests that made her one of the best writers in the world? How did someone like the late President Soeharto progress to be on the hall of fame?

It is again about the need to change a paradigm. In 1984, Howard Gardner, the revolutionist in educational psychology, stated clearly that any kinds of tests, from the Binet IQ test to the present cognitive oriented tests, were out of what American students need. What they need, on the other way, were authentic assessment which represented their actual talents and gifts and could give them lights to discovering their abilities. Based on the truth of how every single human has uniqueness and its own intelligence(s), Gardner voiced the more humanistic approach to enhance American education.

The same movement actually has being proposed by some educationalists in Indonesia. The most recent proposal is likely to be what is called by Munif Chatib, an alumnus of DL Supercamp in California, as Sekolahnya Manusia, a school for human (Mizan, 2009). He is not only applying Gardner’s multiple intelligences quantum leap but also the taxonomy of testing paradigm by Benyamin S. Bloom, and other worldly educational experts. But the response so far is likely to be what have been said by Jusuf Kalla himself one or two years ago that “the experts themselves have thrust the education down into the abyss instead of curing it.”

The paradigm embraced by the current government therefore with its cognitive oriented system makes a school leave the other parts such as conscience and practical skills building. Talents and gifts granted by the God have become unrecognized because uniformity and universalism are the two underlying ideas in the paradigm. All children are to be shaped and prepared in the same way and result.

That is why probably Jalaluddin Rahmad, an Indonesian educationalist, Islamist, and communication expert, joked someday that the government with its educational policy seems to be against the God. Because with the national exams pass requirement, for example, the students are forced to be able in competences different from what the God actually has blessed them. And that is why, perhaps, Indonesian education is still left powerlessly behind and we will still probably see some teachers become all of a sudden inhabitants of the prisons.

The writer is a teacher.