It is definitely a noble intention. Compiling an anti-corruption module to be integrated in the curriculum may be a specific and concrete task that can be completed in the near future.

However, transferring honest values to the young generation requires much more than just curricular documents, lesson plans, and worksheets on anti-corruption.

In 1920, Hugh Hartshorne and M.A. May conducted a set of studies on 11,000 school children
aged between eight and 16 years old to measure honesty by giving them a dozen of tests.

The study found that honesty is not a fundamental trait and is significantly influenced by the situation.

The researchers wrote that “most children will deceive in certain situations and not in others.

“Lying, cheating, and stealing as measured by the test situations used in these studies are only very loosely related.”

Another study was conducted by Princeton University psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson (1973). They recreated a simulation from the biblical story of the Good Samaritan and put groups of Princeton theological seminarians in different situations.

This study concluded that the conviction of someone’s heart is less important than the immediate context of behavior. Even when a group of these seminarians were thinking of the story, they were not compelled to help a victim along their way and chose to hurry on.  

In his best-selling book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell argues further that crime is contagious. Gladwell quotes the Broken Window theory by James Wilson and George Kelling stating that crime is the inevitable result of disorder.

If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that nobody cares.

Soon, some more windows will be broken and the sense of anarchy will spread.

This theory also applies to dishonest behavior among school children. Lying, cheating, and stealing practiced by schoolchildren may grow as an embryo into corrupt behaviors in their adult lives.

Worse, cheating endorsed by their teachers and the education system, as in the case of letting the ends justify the means to pass the national exam, will further confirm the formation of corrupt habits and tendencies.

In addition, the external environment beyond schools reveals that the prevailing corrupt values and behaviors find their ways to beat the system. These are powerful lessons absorbed by schoolchildren in spite of anti-corruption curriculum dictated upon them.

As a crime, corruption is an epidemic. The good news is if an epidemic can be reversed by controlling the immediate environment, a predisposition to corrupt behaviors can also be prevented.

In many ways, children are significantly affected by their external environment. Situations can and should be created so as to discourage cheating and lying.  

The key to effective character education in schools is not developing new modules to be added to the curriculum which may further overwhelm teachers. The coverage of the curriculum has been too broad already to ensure mastery during the teaching and learning process. There are more effective ways to cultivate honesty and integrity among the young people through schools.

First and foremost, the movement for the formation of anti-corruption habits should not be a top-down policy with the new modules from the national government handed down to schools.

What will surely follow is rote-learning geared to get students stuck at the memorization level. The formation of anti-corruption values and habits should grow as a social movement centered in each school as a unit of operation.

Cultivating characters of integrity should be conducted school by school and person by person.  Now that the corruption culture is rampant, quantity should not be an indicator of success.

To start a reverse epidemic of anti-corruption values and behaviors, small-scaled initiatives in various places should be encouraged. Based on findings in neuroscience and social psychology, Gladwell quotes the magic number of 150 in his theory of the Power of the Few in starting a compelling epidemic.

To function well and engage in effective social relationships, a community should limit its size to approximately 150 members. Small schools should be at an advantage in creating situations that allow the habit formation of honesty and integrity person by person.

Large schools should attempt to find ways to pay more attention to each individual student by breaking down the student body into smaller, supervised and mentored groups.

Next, fix the broken window.

The National Education Ministry has just commendably revised the national exam policy by giving
more authority to schools as partners in determining the graduation requirements.

A code of conduct should be enforced for both teachers and students. Cheating, lying, and stealing should be strictly penalized. This applies not only to exams but also to other matters such as teacher certification, the use of funding in schools, and school accreditation.

Furthermore, it is time to design a learning process and assessment method where cheating is no longer relevant. Students should be assessed not by how many facts they can memorize and retrieve
but how well they can solve problems, how their creativity may benefit the society, and how effectively they can communicate their thoughts to others.

Standardized multiple-choice testing is usually used for large-scale targets and serves the purpose
of statistical descriptions of progress. Other dimensions of progress (and regress) can only be captured by more personalized and qualitative assessment.

Habit formation should start as early as possible. This national movement would be effective
only if the teaching and learning process was not centered on the nationally-standardized modules but on the social modeling of character development.

The writer is a professor of education at Widya Mandala Catholic University, Surabaya, and a member of the Indonesian Community for Democracy (KID).

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