Re-Education: Part 2

"An educated man is one who can entertain a new idea, entertain another person and entertain himself."

~ Sydney Wood

Education should be tied to greater community, it should serve the mass, it should rejuvenate the society and brings transformation to the world. I believe that, just like Jean Piaget said, "the principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done."  We should eliminate the 'tradition' value of education. We should inject a new paradigm of education for the new century, or else, we went astray in the face of globalization and modernity. Grades and scores, titles and degrees, they meant nothing for today's standard, where academic achievement wasn't the only thing that counts. We need more than just A score, we need more than just 4,00 GPA. We need to radically rethink about our view of intelligence, valuing more than just academic intelligence. We need new ideas, we need actions, we need creativity.

 

 

I knew my responsibility as a student, an agent of change. I knew my role as a scholar, that's why I'm complaining about this education issue. We have to transform schools because, as currently structured, the curriculum, the pedagogy, the evaluation and assessment systems are each designed to serve the interest of an outdated industrial model of education. A 'tradition' keeper, I might say. My whole life, I've been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. I've been the labor of schools, forced to 'work' for a thing called grades and scores. Laboring under the burden of too much disconnected content, I have little time to reflect them back for a meaningful insights. In this environment, imagination, creativity, and innovation are not required, taught or assessed. No wonder students graduate without these skills and without any understanding of what they are good at or what they have a passion for.

Passion. Creativity. Imagination. They are the things that missing from our education system, where everything were viewed from dichotomic perspective of right and wrong. A set of black and white options. Our education system make us afraid of making mistakes. Education of today, set an utter distinction between 'correct' and 'wrong'. They associate our development with labels like 'above average', 'average' or 'failed'. That's why we'll never come up with anything original because we're frightened of being wrong. We're afraid to make mistakes. We stigmatize mistakes. We're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.
The result is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities. We are producing people who went to school only for living up their parents' 'tradition' or for the expectation of entitlement. We were bounded, handcuffed for too long….

"Students with restless minds and bodies -- far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity -- are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences."

~Sir Ken Robinson

 

<TO BE CONTINUED>

Re-Education: Part 1

"Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education."
~Bertrand Russell

(This series of writing is pretty much my rant against the education system of our country--and to greater extent, the whole world--which is damn too strict it's choking our neck and often leaving us, the student, breathless. The 21st century's education is pretty much the same as it is in the last century--we didn't developed that much, other than the teaching instruments and technical areas.)

Up till now, I am still a student, and one complaints I had to address was that our policies and beliefs in educating children was only something that 'culturally' passed from generations to generations, a 'rites of passage', that was taken for granted. Meaningless and hollow. No deep meanings gained, no insights followed. I am a child who grew up in sufficient family, and to my family, school is a 'must', and by 'must' I meant 'taken for granted'. School, for others similar family like mine, was something automatic--like breathing or having a breakfast. To us, went to school was a ritual activities that had been done by my mother's mother and my father's father and so do I, as their heir, must follow the tradition.

The school environment greatly reinforced those beliefs--even making it worse. Schools often seem to be focusing only in teaching students to be literate in mathematics, English language arts, and science in order to preparing them to do well on the Diknas mandated and designed, standardized final tests. Notice something that's missing here: free space. Our education system didn't provide any room for explorations and innovations to the students. Strict rules and rigid 'positivist' approach--in the name of disciplines teaching--can be found in any school in the world, and reinforced only the 'tradition-like' value of schooling. This particular environment, I should say, endanger the students. It's killing their creativity.

<TO BE CONTINUED>