A few months ago, we were surprised by the news that four senior high school students at a state school in Riau province were expelled from school after they humiliated and threatened their teacher through Facebook (a popular social networking). The students did so because they felt so burdened by the homework given by their teacher — a life skills teacher. And that is only one sad piece of news relating to education, at least for me, compared to other incidents about Internet technology, especially a booming social networking site called Facebook.
The fact that students were expelled for humiliating their teacher on the Internet is quite worrying as, like it or not, it has a strong relation to the learning process (in this case: at secondary level) at institutions where pupils study, or generally at all the schools in our country. The school board — I read on the news portal — took the decision after a teachers’ meeting. But frankly, the decision to expel students because of such action makes me concerned about the students’ morals.
What concerns me is a question: did it never occur to the school board to think that their students’ action had anything to do with their teaching methods, or our national education curriculum in general?
In this case, I am questioning the evaluative attitude of the educators. The above case is not the only one that taints our education world. There are so many cases concerning tawuran (street fighting) between schools or student gangs, seniors bullying their juniors, promiscuous sex and so on.
As a person who is involved in teaching, who was once a student too, I am sure that the immoral acts mentioned have a sturdy cause-and-effect relationship with our education system and national curriculum. As a tutor in a private education institution, engaging in educating school-aged children, I see that our education system is too score-oriented, where students are looked upon as if they were score manufacturers. It is not a secret that in many schools, a score (I mean a written score) has become a kind of commodity.
I still remember when I was a student, I heard there were students marking their report book scores in order to be accepted at a state university. Another example, the most up-to-date one, is of students successful in art, sports, science competitions and so on, not graduating from their schools, as they did not get the minimum marks for the subjects in the National Examination. It has to be underlined that the minimum scores for the National Examination are set by the central government for all regions equally throughout the country, while we know that the facilities supporting the teaching-learning process in all the regions are not of the same quality.
With such a threatening score policy, learners are under intense pressure in school subjects, especially those tested in the National Exam, and it is not unusual for pupils to be isolated from the “outside world”.
This proves that our education system does not pay attention to the creativity potential of the students.
An education system hounding students to get high marks like this, of course, results in negative psychological effects on the students. It is not impossible that the behavior mentioned is a kind of reaction by pressured souls against the excesses of a repressive education system with a tool named nilai (score).
Herdiana
Bekasi, West Java
