Between idealism and pragmatism in education

Mochtar Buchori, Jakarta

On Aug. 13, I attended the funeral of a close friend. He was 82 or 83 at the time of his death. I had known him for 40 years. He came from a well-to-do family. His father was a medical doctor, and he was a medical student himself, until he was expelled from medical school during the Japanese occupation.

Since then he led an active political life, as an underground activist during the Japanese occupation and as a party official later on. This was until his party was banned by the Sukarno regime. He then resumed his life as a political activist, quietly but persistently mentoring young people toward consciously objecting against any form of totalitarianism.

I became close to him in 1963, when I joined a group of senior political activists trying to stop Sukarno leaning toward the left. When it became clear that Sukarno was unstoppable in his political maneuvers toward the left, the issue became how to prevent the nation and the country from becoming a totalitarian state after Sukarno was gone. Then the 1965 failed coup occurred.

This friend of mine was known by many as a quiet political mentor. He mentored many young people, some of whom since became national celebrities. I was not mentored by him, but by a close friend of his.

What broke my heart when I attended the funeral were the conditions under which he died. For a number of years until his death he lived in a house owned by a close friend of his who passed away several years earlier.

He had no family; no wife and no children of his own. His wife, who was already a widow when he married her, died about 10 years earlier. Before his death he was hospitalized for four days. Since he had no money a number of his friends took care of the hospital bills. One friend who had known him longer than I did called him an "intellectual pauper".

At the funeral I met a great number of people I know personally, ranging from my friend's generation to the generation of my daughter. And there were other younger people as well whom unfortunately I did not know personally. This means to me that my deceased friend had been mentoring people from various age groups.

What I noticed about the mourners was that people of his age did not give the impression that they were rich. Some of the mourners whom I knew personally were even still unmarried. And what I know about these people is that they have their entire adult lives worked for a cause. They live for their idealism.

Their ideals matter more than their personal well-being. In my younger years I used to live with this kind of idealism. A romantic idealism, I would say. I was, and still am, very sure of the rightness of the idealism I pursued, to the point that I declined a political offer to join the bureaucracy. This idealism drove me toward hard work, fairness and honesty, several times neglecting my personal interests. I was fanatical about my idealism.

But later on, after I felt that I could no longer live alone, and decided to get married and have children, I gradually changed my lifestyle. I began to think of my personal needs and interests, but never at the expense of my idealism. That may be the reason that until now I am still relatively poor, meaning, among other things, that I do not even live in a house of my own. I still live in a government house.

What makes my friend and many people of the same age, including myself, live the way we do? And what makes my children and young people from their generation live so differently from us, people from the older generations?

I think it is education. In my generation a very strong dose of idealism was injected into our education. Living for a cause was imprinted in our minds as the only way of living a meaningful life. Living solely for the purpose of accumulating material wealth was considered less noble, if not outright vulgar.

But this stark difference in the way of life between two generations, and its consequences in real personal lives, makes me wonder whether it is really good to have so much idealism in one's education.

Wouldn't it be better if we, people of the older generations, i.e. the generation of my deceased friend down to my generation, had a little bit of pragmatism in our education? After all, at the end every one has to take care of himself or herself. No one else will. Not the government, not the company where you spent your entire working life and not the insurance company or the retirement fund. Not your children either.

However, looking at the lives of young people today, I wonder whether the younger generation doesn't have too much pragmatism in their education, and whether it would be better to give them a little bit idealism.

They became affluent at the age of 40, but many of them have serious physical illnesses, and they do not seem to care very much about the condition of the country. As long as their personal interests are not jeopardized everything else seems to be OK with them.

The question to be solved now is how to strike a balance between romantic idealism and excessive pragmatism in education. This is a question I am not sure I can answer intelligently.

The idea that comes to my mind is that we have to provide education that is realistically idealistic and not excessively pragmatic. What must be prevented is excessively romantic idealism and excessively vulgar pragmatism in education.

Can idealism be excessive? I am not sure. What I am sure of is that it is much easier for pragmatism to become excessive. This is because pragmatism puts much emphasis on observable practical consequences. This is not the case with idealism, which envisions things in ideal form, not in material form. The natural tendency of idealists is to become romantic, whereas that of pragmatists is to become materialistic.

Somerset Maugham wrote in 1938, "Excess can be exhilarating on occasion. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit." But let us be forewarned, Woodrow Wilson said in 1918, "Excesses accomplish nothing. Disorder immediately defeats itself."

Maybe what we should try to develop is education that is realistically idealistic, which while acknowledging the value of pragmatism has the ability to resist any temptation to become excessively pragmatic.

The writer is a former rector of IKIP Muhammadiyah, Jakarta, and has a PhD in education from Harvard University.