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Your letters: Local wisdom-based education

Besides being culture-based principles that have long been believed, local wisdom embodied through education basically reflects how people live, what they value and how they generate cultural assumptions or ideas intending to protect the life of a nation and the ideology of human civilization

The Jakarta Post
Wed, November 25, 2015

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Your letters: Local wisdom-based education

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esides being culture-based principles that have long been believed, local wisdom embodied through education basically reflects how people live, what they value and how they generate cultural assumptions or ideas intending to protect the life of a nation and the ideology of human civilization.

Research conducted by Göttingen Studies in Cultural Property (2013) reports that local culture turns out to be a means of reinforcing the identity of indigenous people, which acts as a preserver of values within cultural traditions. In 2012, Pierre Bercis, the founder and president of the French NGO, Nouveaux Droits de l'€™Homme, defined a cultural tradition as a great wealth that contributes to every nation and humankind in the form of natural sciences, literature, music, spirituality, lifestyle, etc.

In what follows, every local cultural tradition becomes an important milestone for indigenous people to acknowledge regional uniqueness, the diversity of ethnic groups and values-laden life systems rooted in local ritual practices.

For the glory of humane education, an appreciation of local cultural perspectives are needed to strengthen our national character building, which will determine whether or not educational policies are culturally-oriented as required. Over time, however, as it might have happened, the focus of our education still oscillates between the production of knowledge and creative innovations based on noble cultural traditions.

This results in two specific educational problems. First, our education sector has shifted its focus away from reforming social behavior, local norms, national moral crises and other social concerns to pursuing knowledge just for the sake of the mastery and advancement of sciences. Second, our education sector doesn'€™t fully aim to engage with indigenous people and communal organizations in terms of keeping the environment clean, avoiding forest fires and promoting public policy, local beliefs, social norms and other pertinent principles of life.

It has been further articulated that the spirit of transformative education should concern an appreciative approach that depends entirely on the policies in which any educational regulations meet the goals to take action to stop indigenous people from burning forests, killing animals, overfishing and operating illegal mines, all actions that have direct impacts on social problems.

The term '€œappreciative'€ puts more emphasis on how a local cultural approach exists along a continuum of conceptual and practical contexts of education to build on the firm foundation of the general public'€™s daily life including substantive areas of human development, and the empowerment of indigenous people. In this educational pragmatic domain lies a dedication to addressing the government'€™s participation in optimizing the development of rural communities in general.

In fact, education can facilitate indigenous people'€™s awareness and sensitivity to preserve local traditions working in synergy with the government and social organizations while also protecting them from the dangers of foreign cultures that might threaten them. At the same time, if our cultural resources in the form of '€œancient masks'€ (The Jakarta Post, Nov. 11), dances, songs, poems, arts, etc., are on the brink of extinction, it is impossible for us to calculate the possible fatal impacts for our young generation in the future.

Anselmus Sudirman
Yogyakarta

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