Citizenship Education
Illustration: Handining
Indonesia has called for civility at a time when its cities are shrouded in clouds of hatred and possessed people are seemingly burning down their own homes.
How can civility fulfill the call when our own parenting and education pattern neglected it for a long time? Something that we have demeaned and neglected for so long surely will not save us in our time of need.
In mankind’s grand tradition, we find that the term city (polis, civic, madina) has positive connotations: that of civility, splendor and orderliness. The guardians of city life are called the police, which is related to the word poli (polite), meaning social order – well-mannered and civilized.
Being city residents means being civilized. “Being civilized,” said Fernand Braudel, “means promoting exemplary manners and being more orderly, law-abiding and sociable.” Max Weber defines a city as “a place planned for cultured and rational people”.
However, currently lives in major cities – especially the capital – tend to approach the characteristics of a “hollow city” as explained by Clifford Geertz: a vacuum without values, without vision, without heart. City life that is supposed to be the basis of civilization has now plunged into what Machiavelli called a “corrupt city” or what Al-Farabi called a “backward city” (almudun al-jahiliyyah).
In a corrupt and cruel republic, friendships fall apart. Everyone is in a race to betray the state and each other; faith and religion are abused; mutual trust is eroded; legal institutions cannot effectively maintain peace and order; hard work and integrity are despised; laziness and corruption are venerated. Ethical virtues are destroyed and replaced with violence and greed. Cities as realms of civilization have become mediums of dehumanization.
The manifestation of civic nationalism is obstructed by a poor citizenship culture. Membership in a nation requires “virtues of civility”, namely a sense of linkage and partnership amid various differences and a willingness to share a common substance that transcends group interests and to soften and submit tolerantly to civil order. Unfortunately, to borrow the assessment of Edward Shils (1972), what is developing here is a strong tendency of the politicization of identity that is combined with the belief that only those with common principles and primordial similarities are seen as legitimate members of a political community, while those who are different are excluded by steep and rugged barriers.
In a corrupt and cruel republic, friendships fall apart.
Character education
The paralysis of values of public civility in a diverse society that is having difficulty finding common goals and virtues is a nightmare for the nation’s development. Therefore, a cultural campaign of understanding, appreciating and practicing values of multicultural citizenship through character building is necessary.
Thomas Lickona is his celebrated work Educating for Character (1991) concluded that character education is a deliberate attempt to assist students to understand, care for and act on the core basis of ethical values. He affirmed: when we think about the character traits that we wish our children to display, it is crystal clear that we expect them to be able to assess what is right, care for what is right and do what they think is right – even in the face of inner temptations and external pressures.
Character education has a dual orientation. Inwards, the education process must be able to assist students to identify their unique potentials and to place these potentials in the context of unity. This process of identifying unique self-potentials and commitment to common values become the basis of character building. “Character” in this context means the psychological tendency to form a moral personality (Lickona, 2011).
Outwards, the education must provide a medium for students to recognize and develop culture as a value system, knowledge system and a shared behavior system through exercises of the mind, the heart, manners and body. Culture as a value system, knowledge system and behavior system will holistically create a social environment that can determine whether an individual’s disposition will be better or worse.
Culture as a social environment can also be said to be a medium of collective character building (of a nation). Otto Bauer famously defined “nation” as “a community of character which has grown out of a community of shared experience.”
The process of education must be able to link an individual’s capacity to the collective life as a member of the community, the nation and the world for the sake of maintaining cosmological order and global harmony. Such an understanding, according to Ki Hadjar Dewantara, can be seen in the motto mengaju-aju salira, mengaju-aju bangsa, mengaju-aju manungsa (ensuring the contentment of self, the contentment of the nation and the contentment of all humanity).
Character education in a multicultural nation must be able to provide larger attention to the nurturing of a nation\'s collective character. It will not be enough for an education curriculum to develop cognitive, spiritual and emotional intelligences. What is more important is “citizenship intelligence”. Good individuals (the result of family-based, religious and cultural community education processes) can only become good citizens with the skills to identify, appreciate and practice conceptions and consensus of nationhood. Through the education process, students must develop skills to appreciate differences as the nation’s wealth and recognize points of similarities as the foundation of unity.
A revitalization and reactualization of citizenship education based on Pancasila is necessary.
A revitalization and reactualization of citizenship education based on Pancasila is necessary. Pancasila as a value system, a knowledge system and a shared behavior system is holistically expected to form a social environment to assist in the development of personal disposition in the right direction.
Education: National transformation
Education as a process of civilization of citizens in a multicultural society must be implemented in line with the context of local socio-historical challenges. In other words, education must be closely linked to the visions of national transformation.
For Indonesians, the vision of transformative education was generally outlined by the small team of the Indonesian Independence Preparation Investigative Assembly (BPUPKI) led by Ki Hadjar Dewantara. On July 17, 1945, the small team compiled the Guidelines for Teaching and Education that outline the process of national transformation through education that promotes the ideas of equality, welfare, progress, identity and unity in diversity.
In the context of public civility transformation, we should at least observe the aspects of equality, unity in diversity and the response of national identity in the face of globalization.
First, let us all remind ourselves that Indonesia’s independence was celebrated with the spirits of freedom, equality and brotherhood. The end of colonialism triggered a strong sense of hope among the people that the social discrimination and boundaries enforced by the colonial government would be torn down. Education was expected to be a medium of social emancipation. The political commitment to fulfill this desire is encapsulated in Article 31 of the 1945 Constitution: “Every citizen has a right to an education.”
Therefore, every time we see signs that the education system is moving toward social discrimination and divisions based on purchasing power, we should strive to fight these degenerate diseases and restore our education as mandated by the Constitution.
Second, in the efforts to develop a spirit of unity in diversity, education policies must provide a balance between fulfilling demands of diversity on the one hand and unity on the other. For a long time, segregation politics has turned Indonesia into a plural society locked in “plural monoculturalism”; in the sense that the nation has numerous ethno-cultural identities that live in their separate cocoons without any desire to truly share everything with one another. Through political correctness, the people are enforced to transform situations of “plural monoculturalism” into true “multiculturalism” through various policies that facilitate cross-cultural pollination. In such efforts, the enforcement of hegemony of a major culture on minor cultures must be prevented to ensure that the multitude of ethnicities, cultures and religions will be able to live side-by-side and interact as equals in a shared political community.
Students must be able to identify and recognize the rights of multiple groups to express their respective identities in the public sphere. On the other hand, schools must also encourage various ethno-religious groups to interact with one another, share their cultural heritages and participate together in educational, economic, political and legal institutions. In the long run, a cross-cultural pollination process is expected to tear down obstacles of prejudices between cultural groups, encourage cultural hybridity and eventually provide space for individuals to have their rights fulfilled and to determine their own choices.
Students must be able to identify and recognize the rights of multiple groups to express their respective identities in the public sphere.
Nevertheless, the efforts of the state to provide space for coexistence with equal rights for various ethnic, cultural and religious groups must not be paid off with social fragmentation. Therefore, every group should be committed to upholding the consensus of nationhood as stipulated in Pancasila, the 1945 Constitution and other unifying elements such as the Indonesian language.
Third, in facing the expanding streams of globalization with unprecedented speed and penetration, a swift and effective response from the education community is important. Thomas Lickona (2011) said that it was important attention be paid to global tendencies of cracks in family life, the explosion of pop culture as pushed by the media, the strengthening of materialism and the spread of selfishness among youth and the multiple crises triggered by the proliferation of these new lifestyles. Globalization is also a vehicle for the trans-nationalization of religious fundamentalism and market fundamentalism.
In the framework of education with a global perspective, the proper way for the development of mankind as a result of the education process, according to Ki Hadjar, is portrayed in the principle of “tri-con” (continuous, convergent and concentric): “The development must be continuous within its own realm, convergent with other realms and moving toward a universal ‘concentric’ goal of unity, namely united with the larger realm but having its unique identity.” Therefore, universal values in the discourse of humanity must be synchronized through dialogue with the wealth of local wisdoms and global visions being combined with the skills of local cultures.
When the instrumental rationality of globalization requires the strengthening of rational values (of selfhood), the general tendency within education communities is to pay less attention to aspects of civility. Virtues are seen as unimportant and are underestimated in education circles due to overwhelming interests concerning materialism and practicalities.
In the future, the education world is expected to be able to take the positive aspects of scientific and technological advances while avoiding their negative implications. In order to be involved in the era of globalization, students must be able to develop technology literacy, especially regarding computers, the internet and other telematics, as well as mastery of foreign languages. At the same time, global crises triggered by the introduction of new technologies must restore value and character education into the heart of the learning process. The adoption of advanced technology must be balanced with the strengthening.
Yudi Latif
YUDI LATIF
Nationhood and Statehood Thinker
