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.