The efforts of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) to cooperate with bureaucracy and universities were realized through the National Work Meeting on Anti-Corruption Education in Jakarta on Tuesday-Wednesday (11-12/12/2018). This event needs to be appreciated, because 86 percent of corruptors arrested by the KPK are graduates of universities (Suwidi Tono, Anticorruption Dissemination, Kompas, 05/11/2018). At the macro level, this event also reflects efforts to bring education closer to the problem of the nation: corruption.
Our education should offer a solution to various problems faced by this country, such as corruption, threats of national disintegration, intolerance, rampant hate speech and false news, as well as plastic waste and so on. However, it is not a question of anticorruption education that will be reviewed here. This article further highlights the urgency of changing our educational paradigm from deductive to inductive.
Distance and anomaly
Indeed, not all problems of the nation must be accommodated by the curricular structure of our education. This is because education is not an institution of vocational courses or training that only deals with small and short-term issues. Education must be able to cover various macro-generic problems so that academic vitality does not disappear. This is why disciplinary liberal arts material is still important to teach at school.
The problem is that if the gap between education and the reality of everyday life and various problems of the nation was too wide, the two will be less to connected to each other. What is taught at school lacks relevance to our daily needs. Our education often stammers in responding to current issues that have the potential to have destructive effects on the sustainability of this nation. Instead of being responsive, to a certain degree, our education has even dissolved into a vortex of various existing problems.
Even if there is a response to the various problems in question, our education tends to be reactive, sporadic and unreliable. Every time there are new problems, new designs and formulas arise in learning. However, the various problems remain unmoved. Just look at how our civic education — as a replacement of the Pancasila Moral Education — has not been able to overcome the friction and social division of our society.
At the university level, what is studied by all academics on campus is not used as the main reference for the formulation of public policies. Scientific publications and reports on the results of research by lecturers and students only decorate the shelves of campus libraries, leaving them obsolete to the times. There should be a connection between what is taught in the classrooms, which is examined by lecturers and students, and what is applied in public spaces. Our universities are more involved in hegemony and coopted by external forces.
Besides the gap, there is an acute anomaly between what is taught in the world of education and everyday experience. Our education is less down-to-earth; less grounded. On the one hand, the school teaches virtuous morality; on the other hand, what is practiced in society is the opposite behavior, namely corruption along with its various derivatives. The nation\'s children cannot be honest and have integrity not because they have never been taught about these two things in school by their teachers. Learning material about morality is abundant.
In other words, epistemological division occurs in our education world among the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor aspects. The concept of truth in the brain of students, for example, is not necessarily connected and integrated into their consciousness, which is internalized into their daily behavior. The knowledge of students (cognitive) about moral values is apparently not equivalent to conscience (affective) and daily behavior (psychomotor).
Strangely, the teachers often further "worsen" the atmosphere with an apology that the weakness of the nation\'s morality is due to the lack of lessons received by students. Not a few of them recklessly assume that the only panacea for the problems of morality deficit is by adding "doses" of moral lessons to students! This is not a wise apology.
Reception vs production
One explanation as to why our education is not able to dismantle the various problems of the nation is because of the strong grip of deductive reasoning in learning. First, our education places too much emphasis on the transmission or transfer of knowledge in a top-down manner, not bottom-up. The learning process places too much emphasis on the reception process or the acceptance of students on ready-made learning material. This kind of learning model certainly does not sharpen high-order thinking skills (HOTS).
Ideally, our education should develop more aspects of scientific production through HOTS exercises, such as analytical-critical thinking, creative imagination, innovation and even invention. Unfortunately, these aspects of HOTS are relatively absent from our learning. What is widely practiced is learning material that relies on low-order thinking skills (LOTS), such as memorizing. As a result, the mastery of materials is only verbatim and verbalistic cognitive; it does not penetrate to the heart of the matter.
Second, the deductive paradigm tends to ignore empirical experiences and everyday life as an integral part of the learning process. As a result, students find it difficult to understand and master learning material because of the distance from experience or the reality of everyday life. In fact, according to John Dewey (Experience and Education; 1997), the core of education is experience. Therefore, everyday experience is the most important laboratory in education.
The pattern of deductive paradigm learning reminds us of Paulo Freire\'s (1970) banking concept of education theory, which emphasizes the aspect of reception rather than the production of knowledge. In this context, students are treated as "empty vessels" that are ready to accept any material from the teacher without any analytical-critical dialectic process. Education should be able to encourage existential awareness of students through exposure to everyday life experiences.
Third, the deductive paradigm does not place education as a solution to various existing problems. In fact, there is a tendency that education is part of the problem itself. This happens because — once again
— education is separated from the empirical reality of everyday life that is full of social dynamics. Therefore, anticorruption education can be interpreted as an effort to provide solutions to the problems of corruption. (Masdar Hilmy, Professor and Rector of Sunan Ampel State Islamic University, Surabaya)
