Civic education still well out of reach

By Mochtar Buchori

KUALA LUMPUR (JP): An international conference was held here recently focusing on how to strengthen civic education to achieve informed and responsible democratic citizenship.

Initially, I thought that Indonesia would emerge in this conference as a rather bad case. Aren't concepts like civil society, good governance, accountable executive, open and predictable policy-making and the rule of law alien to our educational vocabulary?

How can we expect our schools to teach these concepts to the young generation if teachers and educational administrators alike do not have the slightest idea of what these words actually mean in terms of educational thinking and practice?

How can we expect our schools to play a significant role in guiding the young generation toward democratic citizenship if our schools never understand and never have the courage to understand what has been going on in our political system?

I felt very relieved when I discovered that there are other countries which are worse off than Indonesia in this respect.

There are countries where the idea of volunteering in solving important problems affecting the lives of citizens is entirely foreign, and that consequently, the phenomenon of non- governmental organizations (NGO) is also unknown.

It was really very refreshing to hear one delegate explaining that he finds the term "non-governmental organization" insulting.

In his view, this term defines an important social entity by what it is not. If the logic underlying this usage is consistently applied, then the word "government" must be changed to "non-people organization" (NPO), and NGO be changed into PO (people's organization).

One common feature exhibited by almost all delegates coming to this conference was that school education and politics are looked upon as two separate concepts, and that nothing can bind the two in a meaningful manner.

When I tried to show them that in my experience, the two are intimately interrelated, I was facing a very skeptical audience. I argued that education, conducted in the right manner, could play a very important role in shaping the future of a nation.

But most of the delegates believe that the course of history is determined entirely by forces outside education, and that education can never be a part of such forces.

I countered this argument by saying that this has been and always will be the case as long as education does not even try to become a cultural force.

It must be noted in this connection that history is always the product of interactions of cultural forces, including interaction between a generation that understands Zeitgeist (the spirit of the time) and the dormant potentials that lie within the existing conditions. The question facing educators in this regard is how to make education a part of cultural forces that shape the future?

When the conference discussed the problem of value education, I went back to my basic argument. I said that the process of value or normative education proceeds along three ascending levels, that is understanding the meaning of values, accepting values and finally, voluntarily committing oneself to values.

In most cases, school education stops at memorizing and understanding values, and does not go far enough to reach the next two higher levels: accepting values and committing oneself to values.

The success of normative education also depends upon the way we select and combine values and value systems to be introduced to the students. Whether we lead them toward acceptance of core values like integrity, honor, empathy and humanity, or whether we merely introduce them to marginal values like physical beauty, material wealth, status in the hierarchy systems and the like.

The key to making education a significant cultural force lies in how we define values and value systems to be taught, and how we guide and encourage students toward upholding and defending values and value systems.

If we do these two things correctly, then education will become a cultural force that moves a generation and a nation. Political dynamics is just another aspect of such a cultural force. It is in this sense that there is a relationship between education and politics.

Another important topic discussed during the conference was how to conduct nonformal civic education. There was a consensus among the participants that if a civil society is to materialize in emerging democracies, civic education has to be carried out both inside and outside the school.

Both the young and the old generation need to be informed about the necessity for citizens in free societies to be responsible for what is going to happen in the society, and responsible also for averting conditions that may threaten the security and welfare of the society.

This topic was, in my opinion, not exhaustively discussed. There were two reasons for this. First, most participants did not have the necessary experience, knowledge or interest in nonformal education. Second, civic education is very intimately related to political development. Every attempt to conduct civic education is basically an attempt to influence political development.

Thus, any attempt to organize nonformal civic education is an attempt to make adult citizens aware of their political rights and their civil liberties. This would put the educator in a direct face-to-face encounter with the existing political realities.

Many educators would rather not have this kind of encounter. The key to generating education that can contribute significantly to the development of a democratic society lies in how we relate education to politics.

Any educational system that is willfully blind toward history, and has no courage to relate itself meaningfully to politics, will, in the end, become the slave of a political system.

The conference, Civitas Kuala Lumpur 1998, was attended by 130 participants from 28 countries. It was the fourth of a series of similar conferences initiated by Civitas International, a worldwide organization for civic education, with headquarters in Strasbourg, France.

The first conference was held in Prague in 1995, the second in Buenos Aires, 1996, and the third in Pretoria, 1997. This fourth conference was planned as a forum for countries within the Asia- Pacific region.

The conference was intended to be a forum for discussing problems encountered in carrying out civic education. Sixteen countries from this region participated, ranging all the way from New Zealand in the south to Mongolia in the north, and from Japan in the east to Uzbekistan in the west.

The remaining 12 countries that took part came from the Middle East (Jordan, Oman, and Palestine), Africa (Senegal, Mozambique and Uganda), Central and Western Europe (Czech, Germany and Poland), Latin America (Mexico and Nicaragua) and the United States.

The writer, an observer of social and cultural affairs, is based in Jakarta.