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View all search resultsBhinneka Tunggal Ika as guiding principle needs revisiting
From religious to ethnic discrimination, in schools and through the country’s history, Indonesians seem to feel discomfort in addressing issues of ethnicity, presumably promoting homogeneity in the name of cultural understanding of diversity. This is important to address, especially starting from within schools.
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I
n Indonesia, education is considered a tool for strengthening social cohesion in a country where prosperity and living standards are unequally distributed, especially along regional lines. Yet practices within educational institutions often do not reflect this regard of unity in diversity to reach such gains, sometimes even sustaining practices of implicit – at times explicit – exclusion.
From religious to ethnic discrimination, in schools and through the country’s history, Indonesians seem to feel discomfort in addressing issues of ethnicity, presumably promoting homogeneity in the name of cultural understanding of diversity. This is important to address, especially starting from within schools.
With the Javanese population being the majority ethnicity, national history, civil servants, migrants and teachers are often disproportionately Javanese — implying that minority groups’ identities, experiences, histories, origins and cultures are easily overlooked.
This issue of inclusivity in the country – or lack thereof – is perverse and spans generations. The most recent reports of these have been that of religious discrimination – with Indonesia being the most populous Muslim country in the world. Some schools have required non-Muslim female students to wear the hijab, with reports of students canceling their enrolment after being asked to sign a document declaring to do so despite their Catholic faith.
Arguably, because of the prevalence of religious discriminatory practices taking the forefront of these headlines, discrimination against ethnic minorities is often sidelined. Not only that, ethnic discrimination is often rooted in imbalances of power and (resource) extraction.
Two ethnic minorities with such contentious histories and have an associated stereotype are the Chinese-Indonesians and the Papuan people. These groups hold very different narratives, but both are major victims of the discriminatory environments that have — and still do — surround them. Without more targeted interventions to counteract continuous acts of discrimination to (and even from) these groups, it can create siloes of deepening echo-chambers that reinforce their own “popular narratives”.
Noting that Chinese-Indonesians and Papuans are mostly non-Muslim minorities, this may additionally play an underlying role in the negligence of this discriminatory practice. Keeping quiet may only perpetuates this.
