Antara

In its long pursuit of global acceptance, and perhaps global recognition, education in the country has undergone repeated overhauls in its system and policy, so as to keep abreast with the current paradigmatic trends in education. Yet, despite strenuous efforts invested in such a pursuit, problems still linger.

In a recent interview with The Jakarta Post, Education and Culture Minister Muhadjir Effendy acknowledged that these problems, which included quality, quantity, access and relevance to the workforce needs and social demands, remains unresolved.

Among these quandaries, teacher quality has become the government’s biggest concern. To this, Muhadjir reasoned that teachers’ performance had been out of sync with the established teaching standards that encompassed learning substance, learning process, learning evaluation and teaching competence. While all these are plausible arguments, they tend to oversimplify the complexities of the problems faced by the country.

Implied in Muhadjir’s remarks are the very limited perspectives of education practices within the broader cultural and political frameworks that shape and are shaped by the education system and policy.

It is thus not sufficient to lay claim over the lack of quality of teachers, the rarity of access to education and the close link of formal education to workforce demands as unrelenting problems to be addressed, and ultimately to think of ways out of these problem outside the ambit of the social, cultural and political imperatives.

Educational practices everywhere, including in Indonesia, are bound up with the cultural and political aspects of those countries where the practices take place. Thus, the persistent problems can only be effectively addressed and their solutions found by contextualizing them within the broader cultural politics of education in a specific locality.

Education, in essence, ought to constitute the practice of locality, despite its being relentlessly infused by global values and characters. Its local characteristics should stand as the fundamental pillars for appropriating and countering any constructs deemed uncongenial with the local values and principles.

Yet, amid the global forces that compel us to envisage education as a global enterprise, there is a tendency to look into an imported educational framework that is presupposed to purportedly provide a one-size-fits-all model or solution to be aped, and accordingly to demote local educational values as irrelevant, outdated, and muddle-headed.

This is precisely what happened when the Education and Culture Ministry feverishly promoted the so-called higher order thinking skills (HOTS) as a conceptual reference for designing pedagogic activities such as teaching methods, curriculum and material designs, and assessment. It is this concept that is probably being pigeonholed as the fittest teaching standards to be emulated to date, concomitant with the advent of advanced communication and technology that demands HOTS from its users.

We need to be mindful, however, that any educational products manufactured and marketed as useful in a certain place may not necessarily be rendered useful when applied in other contexts. In other words, they may not dovetail well with the cultural politics of other contexts.

With its heavy emphasis on mental or rational control, HOTS clearly owes its intellectual allegiance from the Western-based thinking products, a construct which may not necessarily congenial with the local educational practices.

A blithe, wholesale adoption of this concept reflects the tacit endorsement of the superiority of a foreign product, and at the same time mirrors the relegation of the cultural politics of national education, which has long been conceptualized by Indonesia’s education pioneer Ki Hadjar Dewantara through his famous dictum Ing ngarso sung tuladha; ing madya mangun karsa; tut wuri handayani, which literally means “provide a model; create a goal; and provide constructive support” as well as through its methods emong, “to care for, among, ‘to serve’ and pamong, ‘to protect.”

The contrast between the HOTS concept and the local cultural politics of Dewantara seem stark. Whereas, the former gives prominence to rational control over anything else, the latter stresses the import of affective facets and character-building as a foundation of education. While the former aims at the attainment of critical and analytical thinking, the latter is concerned with the inculcation of critical consciousness.

Five basic tenets

In his book Visi Pendidikan Ki Hadjar Dewantara (Ki Hadjar Dewantara Education Vision), Bartolomeus Samho showcases the relevance of the almost abandoned Dewantara’s local wisdom, and his five basic tenets of education known as pancadharma or five merits, viz. nature, freedom, culture, nationhood and humanity in the context of present day educational practices.

His synthesis of Dewantara’s teachings in the book serves as an important backdrop against which Samho challenges contemporary education practitioners and policymakers in not only fathoming his thoughts but also contemplating and applying them in real practice.

With the tendency of national education system being abetted and assisted by neo-liberal projects, Bartolomeus has attempted to reclaim the vitality of the cultural politics of national education amid the proliferation of foreign imported educational frameworks.

The ideas of reclaiming the cultural politics of national education should not be construed as the total rejection of other educational frameworks alien to the locality practice of education. Instead, they should be seen as an educational activism that can help critically interrogate and appropriate foreign educational models, and more importantly raise the cultural politics consciousness of those teachers whose cultural identity is subjugated.

Seeking a newfangled imported theoretical insights and models of education to be emulated, and simultaneously abandoning the local cultural politics of national education - simply for the sake of satisfying the demands of global market place – amounts to throwing the baby out of the bathwater.

Yet, among other factors that are responsible for contributing to the country’s languishing education system, the poor teaching competence of teachers are often alleged to be culpable for hampering efforts to attain quality education. As a result, extensive teacher training is given as a corrective and even as a magic-potion for this purported woe.

Such is a myopic allegation. Accusing poor teachers’ competence without rethinking whether or not the currently-used educational frameworks and the mandated-policy are responsive and sensitive to individual teacher, institutional, social, political and cultural context certainly does disservice to their profession.

Any educational program, to quoted Indian scholar B. Kumaravadivelu, “must be sensitive to a particular group of teachers teaching a particular group of learners pursuing a particular set of goals within a particular institutional context embedded in a particular socio-cultural milieu.”

Following this line of thought, educational policy and conceptual framework used need to be formulated by considering the socio-cultural complexities of the locality where the pedagogical practices take place.

In the end, instituting quick-fix educational reforms in a bid to impress global capital by succumbing to foreign products will only exacerbate the already myriad problems, provided that such an endeavor is devoid of a political will that can provide strong support for the reclaiming of the cultural politics of national education.
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The writer teaches at the Graduate School of Applied English Linguistics, Atma Jaya Catholic University, Jakarta. He can be contacted through setiono.sugiharto@gmail.com.

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