T

he ostracism experienced by Siami, the mother of a student at a Gadel elementary school in Surabaya, East Java, is indeed a dear price she must pay for her revelation of fraud consented by a teacher during the national exams. The smartest student in the class, her son, was allegedly forced by the teacher to share his answers with his peers.

An honest mother, Siami probably would have never expected her revelation to have such devastating consequences for her and her family. Siami was alienated by her neighborhood, which also condemned her for having tainted the school’s reputation.

However, we shouldn’t be startled by this incident. Dishonest practices are very common in our educational system and have become an open secret. A university professor here once was caught-red handed copying an article belonging to someone else without acknowledging his source. Plagiarism has been rampant among university lecturers seeking to take shortcuts to advance their professional careers.

In 2009, the Monitoring and Evaluation (MONEV) teams assigned to oversee the government’s teacher certification program reported discovering a massive amount of forged certificates in teachers’ portfolio documents.

What all these cases have in common is scams initiated by educational practitioners who supposedly serve as the epitome of moral standards, and more importantly are the driving force in instilling moral values in students.

With numerous cases of shameful acts committed by teachers witnessed by students as well as the public at large, people seem to have begun to harbor a deep mistrust for educational practices. Intellectuals and classroom teachers, in whom people have high hopes for their children, have failed to set a good example for their students.

Furthermore, the education system created is not society-sensitive, suggesting that it does not accommodate the needs of society and operates on the assumption that any educational activity takes place in a social vacuum.

The recent case of group cheating is a reflection of mass despondency. It may be a case of people being fed up with any educational policy (such as the national exam), which might be uncongenial to the interests and needs of the community. People have long been entertained by many unattested educational beliefs and have become victimized by them.

We must remember that with their legal power, educational policies – including the national exam policy and curriculum implementation, to mention just a few – have the ability to suppress people, and leave them with almost no room for societal feedback and negotiation.

Viewed from a broader perspective, the motives for mass cheating that took place in Gadel (and probably many more schools) are very complex to explicate because, intellectual prudence suggests, they are inextricably bound to sociological and psychological factors.

Sociologically, the implementation of policies, such as those of the UN, has been opposed and even distrusted by educational stakeholders as it brings more harm than benefit. Having long been practiced, the exam system is regarded as unable to reflect the dynamism of the existing social structure and social mobility.

Thus, the teacher-supported group cheating was in fact a form of distrust and a denial of the suppressive state-sponsored exams. The cheating also shows that the exams are undervalued by teachers.

Psychologically, the essence of education has been reduced to the pursuit of grades and certificates only. Both teachers and students are compelled to achieve these goals, and as such are hardly able to contemplate the complex process of teaching and learning they have undergone.

In other words, our educational system heavily stresses the importance of conceptual learning (the acquisition of ideas, knowledge and thoughts), but is devoid of affective or social learning (the acquisition of social conducts, values and attitudes).

It thus sounds too simplistic to say that the group cheating was motivated primarily by the school’s efforts to pass all of its students. Other possible factors that may have contributed to this cheating cannot be ruled out.

No doubt, many alleged fraudulent education practices prevalent in our education system have tarnished the image of education as a noble activity, whose goal is to nurture high moral values in students.

Nevertheless, finding a scapegoat only exacerbates the situation and doesn’t resolve the complex web of problems we are now facing. Provided that a radical move to revamp the whole system isn’t taken immediately, the recurrence of fraudulent acts and other depraved conduct in our educational system is certain.

The writer is an associate professor at Atma Jaya Catholic University and the chief editor of the Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching.