Curricula impose fake pluralism

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.