Build character on value-based rules and modeled by caregivers

Salvatore Simarmata ,  Makassar   |  Sat, 10/04/2008 8:26 AM  |  Opinion

She was severely beaten and tortured, forcing her to give in, as her own classmates poured out their acute anger and hatred on her for no reason.

In Makassar, Syarifah Mukti, a 16-year-old secondary student was tortured by three of her own schoolmates in a moving car, as reported by national television stations. A new black hole in character, nurtured at school.

It’s hard to imagine how badly these acts of her schoolmates could have affected the victim. In a broader sense this erodes the idea of school as a center for intellectual pursuits, honesty, creativity and achievement.

We need to address this issue seriously by looking at efforts and strategies to promote positive student attitudes alongside cognitive and psychomotor potentials, in a very different social context from that of 10 or 20 years ago. Why was such a bright time in her life so unreasonably overshadowed by such despicable acts. Directly or indirectly, elderly and adult people (teachers and parents) share responsibilities for tragedies like this, in terms of the way we are nurturing students and young people.

Your teenage years comprise a fragile stage of life in which to find and reflect the true picture of self, when social interaction with your peers is so much a determinant to building personality. Unfortunately, the role of parents, which has constituted the bulk of constituent traits in children’s character, has been widely replaced by the growth of multimedia pleasures — with children often spending much more time on games than on interaction with their parents.

There are many factors influencing students who are socially deviant inside or outside of school. Firstly, because of lack of rules and guidance in school. There is no single strong authority to legitimate good acts and separate them from bad ones.

Everything is in the gray area. We talk about culture here. School identity should be built upon strong and consistent school-wide rules. Out-of-date techniques on student discipline should be done away with, no matter what.

Maintaining order and discipline should not be enforced by violent acts as happened in schools during the 32 years or more of the New Order.

Students were struck and snapped at to obtain obedience and silence, while failing to build attitudes conducive to self-discipline, leaving students not knowing which positive rules should be followed. The rule was to obey the teachers. Students tended to comply because of fear, not because of rational support for positive habits.

Today there could still be some schools doing things the same old negative way. For instance, students perceived as weak on behavior, beaten and so forth. Students are overseen during school hours by teachers concerned more about misbehavior than good behavior.

But, should discipline be imposed by senior students? Unnecessary constant oversight tends to establish the mirage of discipline, since teachers may be watching. This is perceived negatively because students do not think that their teachers will trust them to behave when they are not overseeing them.

Life in real society means control is often invisible or absent. What’s needed is the consistent implementation of value based rules, with rewards and penalties being firmly upheld. I strongly believe that the personification of rules tends to lead to subtle acts of violence, because order is upheld based on subjective personal feelings. In such cases teachers may decide right from wrong according to their moods and emotions.

Given such inconsistencies, students may be inclined to behave constructively only when there are controls, with teachers present, or parents at home. What about when they are entrusted with responsibilities or roles when there is no supervision. I worry that this syndrome may play some role in the catastrophic prevalence of corruption in the country.

Character-building classes are good. But, problems still exist with our character building education, as Doni Koesoema (2007:123) pointed out. There are several reasons why character building education has not been very successful:

First, teachers and schools lack a grounding in such concepts. Hence, there is no integrated teaching of character building. The essential objectives of character education have been pointlessly directed into evaluations and assessments. Character evaluation should only be recognized on the basis of time-based performance in doing good things and meeting prescribed criteria. It’s absolutely straightforward.

Nurturing character should be deliberately moved out of the classroom walls. With this in mind, some methods for generating a sense of responsibility are badly needed. Transforming independent individual actions into good habits is a very strong way forward. A very creative example, called the “honesty canteen” (a canteen with no keepers present to monitor or serve the customers), was practiced at SMAN 13 and SMAN 112 senior high schools in Jakarta and helped cultivate positive values among students. Unfortunately, the canteen is no longer active The Jakarta Post, Aug. 13, 2008.

Second, the social construction of self esteem takes place, either at school or at home. When a student is perceived to be a low achiever, then his/her behavior tends to conform with this perception.

So it is with behavior development. This can be very dangerous because deviant acts may result from persons who are labeled as deviant, where the labels given to them become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we think students are irresponsible persons, we may tend to make them so.

Labeling theory as explained by Peggy Thoits (Sociological Approaches to Mental Illness, 1999), explains that labels applied to people could influence their behavior especially with negative labels becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. People who are treated as deviant, become deviant.

Hence, the best way to prevent people from committing any wrongdoings would be by preventing labels from being applied to their social relations at school. Similarly, from my point of view, if students were overseen all day long, they would soon encounter the distrust of their teachers.

To sum up, schools should build up their own responsive character-nurturing programs including responsibility-generating techniques, which may benefit the whole education process.

The writer teaches socio-logy at Dian Harapan School. He can be contacted at ss_tore@yahoo.com. This is his personal view.

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