Curricula impose fake pluralism

Zakiyuddin Baidhawy, Center for Cultural Studies and Social Change, Muhammadiyah University of Surakarta

In a nation with so many communal conflicts, how can a multicultural society educate its members for democracy? Many contemporary controversies about public schooling turn on the clash of two apparently competing educational aims: Securing civic values and respecting cultural differences.

Democratic education should be able to integrate both civic and multicultural aims in a principled combination.

For three decades, our education system has barely touched on the problem of how we can respect different religious beliefs and cultures. Instead various cultural identities were simplified, along with efforts to impose parts of Javanese culture to strengthen the rulers, through civic education, in particular lessons and indoctrination in the state ideology Pancasila.

This traditional model illustrates the problem with a civic education unmodified by multiculturalism. This model withheld respect for different ways of life, and denigrated the contributions of minority groups to Indonesian civic culture.

When history classes exalted the contributions of the founding fathers with scant discussion of the basic fundamentals of a nation-state, or the contributions of many local cultures and minorities to civic understanding, public schools failed to teach students the civic values of democratic dissent.

These purported history lessons were repressive and discriminatory. Repression in schooling is commonly identified with banning books and punishing teachers or students for unpopular ideas. A civic education is repressive when it fails to teach appreciation and respect for the positive contributions of minorities to a society's common culture.

An antidote to this traditional civics curriculum is education that aims to appreciate the social contributions and life experiences of the various groups that constitute society. Such appreciation defines one common conception of multicultural education, a conception compatible with the principles of democratic education.

The chief problem with segregated academies is not the inaccuracy of what they teach children about the superior accomplishments of their ancestors, but their attempt to cultivate among these children a sense of superiority based on ethnic, culture and or religion.

This comes at the cost of undercutting mutual respect among citizens. In a democracy, citizens are entitled to equal political and civil liberties.

Schools should not try to increase self-esteem by discriminatory means. This aim is to be distinguished from recognizing and respecting the identification of individuals with particular cultures. This identification is something that public schooling can support, as a way of respecting students with different cultural identifications, and also as a way of recognizing the multitude of cultural opportunities that are open to all students as members of a multicultural society.

We have identified two ways that schools have failed to meet the challenge of securing common values and respecting cultural differences. The traditional civics curriculum imposes a cultural singularity that is false to the pluralism of Indonesia and disrespectful to many of its citizens. A traditional curricula also educates by exclusion by fostering a sense of superiority among some students at the cost of degrading others.

Why worry about cultivating mutual respect and toleration in the face of cultural and political differences? Toleration is an essential democratic virtue and a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of mutual respect.

Mutual respect is a public as well as a private good. It expresses the equal standing of every person as an individual and citizen, and it also enables democratic citizens to discuss their political differences in a productive way.

Schools can teach mutual respect in at least two ways that meet the challenge of joining civic and multicultural aims to the benefit of both. Schools can create a curricula that recognize the multicultural heritage as everyone's resource, belonging to all of us and to future generations.

It also can teach about foreign cultures in a way that is more conducive to our remaining a society of immigrants. We need to respect not only the diverse cultures that are already ours, but also those that are not presently represented within our borders.

Appreciation of cultural diversity is not enough to teach students the civic virtue of mutual respect. Expanding the knowledge of students meets only half the intellectual and moral challenge of the democratic ideal. The second way in which schools can cultivate mutual respect is to teach students how to engage together in respectful discussions in which they strive to understand, appreciate and resolve political disagreements.

A multicultural curriculum dedicated to teaching deliberation would encourage students to respect each other as equal citizens, and to take different points of view seriously when thinking about politics.

The practice of morally informed deliberation engages students in according each other the mutual respect and moral understanding that is too often lacking in contemporary politics. Teaching mutual respect among citizens in these ways is a central aim of civic education in a multicultural democracy.

The writer is also a religious studies and philosophy doctoral candidate at the Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic Institute in Yogyakarta.