Cut down children

Khairil Azhar

“How high does a sycamore grow,
We’ll never know if we cut it down.”
(Vanessa William)

Just call him Ucha. In one year of being third grader he always made the decisive goal to ensure his classmate team wining the match. With a very strong kick for his age and high determination he had been an unchangeable player. Nobody concerned anymore of how he had been a very spoiled and disorganized student in the classroom at the beginning of the academic year. Ucha had been a hero among his classmates and won admiration.
But he was a loser in the eyes of his parents. His mom would let the 8 years old Ucha cross alone in a crowded and dangerous street in Blok M area and copiously paid more attention to his 11 years old brother. Ucha’s birthday is always an ordinary day when his older brother gets what he dreams about. The reason is fairly simple: Ucha never satisfies them with good remarks at school in any subjects. He has just been a burden and no one!
I and my compatriot homeroom teacher painfully tried to persuade his mom to open the possible gateway, to realize the golden side unrevealed of him that he is kinesthetically well built. And it was not once but at any single moment we met each other. There were promises (such as sending him to a football school) and a little effort for a while but till the end of the academic year nothing changed.
And nowadays, at the end of his fourth grade year, Ucha plays poorer and almost sidelined by his classmates. He has been really no one. His kinesthetic talent has been washed away when math, English, or any other “important” subjects in his parents’ mind have made his individual and social behavior more intolerable. “He has been cut down” says Vanessa Williams and no one knows when his raising up comes again.
Ucha is not the only case of course. There are thousands or even a million, based on the latest data given by ISSE, UN or Indonesian education department. The children, who are so-called the ones with special needs, have been abandoned and sidelined.
“But it is not an impossible mission,” said Pak Cipto, a teacher and principal of a school for special need children in Semarang, in a related seminar held for the teachers at Lazuardi School, on Friday, 22 May 2009. And the most important key is about how to make the parents realize the real fact about their children, not only the unfilled part of the glass but also the filled one regardless its amount.
“Take a look at Karisma, a blind-born,” said he. “He has been recorded at MURI (Indonesian Record Museum) for having been able to sing continuously more than 500 songs in five days.” We also have to see Lionel Messi, the Argentine most famous football player nowadays. With averagely smaller body size compared to his compatriots, he has been one of the best in the world and no body looks at how difficult he was in his early childhood anymore.
“The parents,” suggested Pak Cipto, “must leave any possible mind to blame. They must start with thanking the God and do the challenging and most rewarding duty in their lives.” Even hoping and expecting the others is a defeat and makes them powerless. “Please put in mind that the children actually are worthy as their peers. We are the parents who are still deaf and blind.”
And it is possibly about the standard of happiness. Most parents somehow have been dictated to expect a common branded joy, to do what can be called mimicry, to have the same thing what the others have. They then forget the differences and uniqueness, the infinite secret of creation. There should be no worse or better fate. It is actually the way we look will ensure us spotting the hidden diamond.
That is why Pearl S. Buck, the literary Nobel winner, in her The Good Earth, showed eloquently how a helpless daughter of Wang Lung gave him more happiness than his other children when he said, “”Well, and that poor fool of mine brings me more comfort than all the others put together.” His oldest son was busy with his books and luxury image and ask him for more and more things; his second son at the end wanted to sell the good earth he had painfully exerted patch by patch; and his only daughter with a sound mind left him to be at her husband’s house as the tradition required. There then left the poor fool who always smiled at any single moment he looked at her and never demanded anything.
Pearl S. Buck was of course talking about the very extreme of an intolerable condition. But it is probably what the people like to say as wisdom, a view to put everything proportionally. Because in the better facilitated life nowadays, the prevalence of the children with autism, for example, contrarily is increasing with almost a child among a thousand. Please compare it with the condition when Pearl S. Buck did her research in China for the novel almost a hundred years ago!
And it is almost impossible to share some of the burden to the government nowadays. Pak Cipto, for instance, had a good story about this. Although the school where he works is a state-owned school, he had bad experience at once. The school had only received the minimum annual budget and aid before he made it famous and more promising. But after his effort to “sell” the creativity of his mostly lower IQ tested students had become a success, the officials competed to offer helps. But eventually Pak Cipto has still to manage most affairs himself to make sure his three hundred children do their best.
That is why, after all, the parents should move up and make a difference. Or it is the society must do a change. And what a relief when in the first time I worked for an inclusive school, most of the students factually had been endorsed to treat their special need peers as they do to the others. I do believe, it was not only the teachers participating to create this atmosphere, but also the parents did. With better consciousness and being knowledgeable they however have successfully given broader space for the special ones to take part in the world.
Someday, when the time comes for Charita, another special girl, her ability to do use a computer much better than her so-called normal classmates will be appropriately appreciated. Her parents, who still half-believe in the fact and keep looking at the half emptiness of the cup may open their eyes wider to look at what Thomas Alfa Edison did or how Hee Ah Lee hypnotized her audience.
They are also not robots for sure. We are unnecessarily to do what has been done to William James Sidis, one of the most genius American along the time. As if he had been an experimental mouse, Sidis was successfully engineered by his psychologist father to be able writing an anatomy paper in his five; introducing a new algorithm in his eight; and entering Harvard University in his eleven and spoke about the four dimensional organism.
But was he happy in his life? Publicity made him contrarily alienated from himself. Math at the end made him repugnant and left it forever. He did not finish his university degree and ran away. In 1944 he died being jobless, dissocialized and poor. He then has been an anti-climax of what his father wrote in Philistine and Genius, that someone can be formed and engineered psychologically.
Sidis in the end was also a true human being and would be remaining longer as one of the best in case of his father did not cut him down.

The writer is currently a teacher at Lazuardi Global Islamic School – Cinere (an inclusive school). He can be reached at besoreal@gmail.com.