All are responsible for moral education

All are responsible for moral education

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): Since the Reform movement broke out in 1998, the
issue of educational reform has frequently come up as a topic of
public discourse. Popular opinion has been that educational
reform will never be genuinely accomplished without improving our
moral education at schools. Proponents of this view insist that
improving moral education must constitute the first agenda in the
nation's program for educational reform. And what they mean by
"strengthening moral education" is to increase the number of
hours allotted to the teaching of religion.

For a number of reasons I don't share this view. Moral
education or the task of molding the character of students is the
responsibility of the entire teaching staff. Teachers teaching
subject matters other than religion - mathematics, physics,
geography, history, and physical education, also share this
capability and responsibility.

This is because moral education is the "act of guiding
students towards voluntary personal commitment to values". And in
every subject matter, the teaching of sets of knowledge or skills
always involves guiding students in gradually committing
themselves to values inherent in the knowledge or skills
concerned.

This is to say that values as references for morality do not
come from religion alone. Morality within the context of real
social life cannot and should not be measured by one's adherence
to the values or norms prescribed by religion alone. There are
aspects of social morality that do not rest upon religious norms,
but hinge primarily upon norms from sources outside religion:
ethics, traditions, social customs, and organizational
regulations, etc.

Corruption, an undoubtedly immoral act, does not, in most
cases, take place because the perpetrator purposefully intends to
transgress religious norms. Usually the person involved is quite
aware that he is violating an ethical, social, or any other kind
of norm, except a religious one. Morality and religiosity are not
identical. They are concepts that are neither identical nor
equipollent, and should not be treated as such.

In educational practice, religious education is an endeavor
that must be placed above, and that contains more complexities
than, moral education. To paraphrase Professor Philip H Phenix,
religious education can be defined as "the act of guiding the
young in their spiritual journey toward the ultimacy." The term
"ultimacy" is, he writes, a general designation for ideas such as
"infinitude, absoluteness, the unlimited, transcendence,
perfection, completeness, all-inclusiveness, and the supreme.
These ideas are the opposites of ideas like finitude, the
relative, limitation and limitedness, partiality, and the like.

So whereas moral education purports to bring students toward
the understanding and acceptance of yardsticks concerning
goodness, religious education tries to guide students towards the
understanding of transcendental existence, and also the linkage
that theological systems have established between the "present
life" and the "life hereafter." It has also been postulated that
religious education is the effort to instill the idea that the
source of earthly beauty, earthly truth, earthly justice, and so
on is the Ultimate. Hence, expressions like "ultimate Truth",
"ultimate Justice", "ultimate Beauty", and the like.

Another important proposition in religious education is that
teachers of religion can guide the young towards the ultimacy
only to a certain point. Beyond that every person has to go on
his own. No one can accompany us in this journey and place us at
the door of Heaven. Every person is responsible for his or her
next life in the hereafter.

Confusing religious and moral education, and using the same
pedagogical and didactical approaches to teach the two, is
virtually subjecting the school and students to educational
reductionism. This mistake has been most frequent in the teaching
of history. This is usually caused by teachers' desire to make
learning material easier to understand.

But the result is usually that students reach a level of
understanding that is below the one originally intended by the
course. In history, this reductionism has made most students
acquire only knowledge concerning the chronology of events, and
not the meanings of historical events.

What is the result of reductionism in religious education? It
would likely bring about pseudo-religiosity among students, which
will fall far short of the genuine faith in the Ultimate or the
Absolute. Worse, it can bring about greed for heavenly rewards
and constant fear for eternal life in hell. And reductionism in
moral education will bring about only knowledge on what is
prohibited in life on the one hand, and what are the imperatives
of life on the other. It will not bring about personal
commitments to values. In the worst format, it will bring about
hypocrisy.

Another reason for my objection against entrusting moral
education to teachers of religion is that moral education in our
schools is not intended to mold only the moral or character of
individual students. It is primarily intended to mold the
collective character of the students. When moral education was
not conducted as a special course, but as a general discourse of
character building (pendidikan budi pekerti), no effort was made
to mold the individual character of individual students.

Such a discourse usually consisted of lectures and discussions
on the basic fundamentals of morality or civility, which were
derived from social and ethical norms that were considered valid
at the time.

It has also been said, sometimes, that moral education aims to
mold a "collective personality" among the students, a personality
considered as the "trade mark" of a given school. Schools with a
good reputation --"favorite schools" or "popular schools"-- are
schools that succeed in building a distinct collective
personality among their students. This distinct personality is in
turn looked upon by the public as the school's institutional
"trade mark". Collective personality among students of a school
is in general achieved through institutional approaches and
methods, and not through tutoring by individual teachers.

Building individual character, on the other hand, is done
through educative interactions between individual students and
individual teachers. Here it is only teachers who can win the
trust of individual students who at the end will be able to
influence students in their choice of personal value systems, and
hence in the development of their personal character of morality.
Only teachers capable of accepting students as they are, and
treating them as their "equals", will be able to win the trust of
the students.

Teachers who put themselves "above" the students will never be
able to contribute anything to the development of personal
character among students. Religious teachers who adopt a "holier-
than-thou" attitude towards students will encounter very strong
resistance when they try to influence them in their choice of
values and value systems. Only religious teachers who exhibit
"democratic" or "egalitarian" attitudes towards students will
find it possible to guide the young in their search for a format
of religious personality that they can consider their own.

Is moral education really such an important part of reforming
our educational system? It is -- but this does not mean that this
reform can be accomplished without giving due attention to other
important components. Improvement in moral education without
improvements in the teaching of languages and mathematics,
natural, social, and human sciences will not, I fear, adequately
prepare the young to meet the tough challenges of life that lie
ahead.

The writer is a former rector of the Muhammadiyah University in
Jakarta and a legislator from the Indonesian Democratic Party of
Struggle.