Curriculum more than subject list

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): Educating students about human rights became a topic of discussion recently. It was argued that students should receive instruction in human rights to make society more mindful towards problems of human dignity. The problem is how to incorporate this particular topic into an already swollen curriculum.

This kind of discussion, typical to Indonesia, comes up every time someone feels the need to add a new subject to the curriculum.

The curriculum has always been viewed as a list of courses, and renewing it is just a matter of adding a new subject while dropping an old one from the list. Since all parties jealously guard their favorite subject, the process of curriculum building has become an exercise in bargaining among interested parties.

When no agreement can be reached, the easy solution is to add the new subject without dropping a subject. This has led the course list for various educational institutions to grow to unwieldy proportions.

I witnessed this same phenomenon at a recent seminar. In a seminar discussing the design of madrasah unggul (super Islamic boarding school), a common understanding was reached that this particular type of school should have both the features of superschools for general education and those of Islamic religious schools.

When the discussion reached the stage of identifying courses to be taught, however, the debate became chaotic and unmanageable. The participants were divided into two camps. One group maintained that a super madrasah should be on par with superschools in academic quality. The other camp argued that super madrasah must be superior primarily in its religious instruction.

The session purported to generate a curricular skeleton became a bargaining session between the two sides. The curriculum was again viewed as a compilation of courses without serious attempt to define its structure. Since neither side was able to decide which ones among their proposed courses can be "sacrificed", the discussion came into a deadlock.

As long as curriculum is considered merely as a list of courses, the problem of competing interests will remain unsolved.

It would be more productive to view curriculum as a structure which founded upon a chosen design. Curricular structure can be envisaged as a building with a number of compartments, each compartment having its own character and distinct function.

Each time an innovation or even an overall revision is needed, the nature of the change must be described and the definition broken into several components.

In the case of introducing a course in human rights, for instance, defining the essence of human rights education must come first. Then its main components must be outlined. Finally, the curricular substance of each component must be delineated. In this way, human rights can be introduced into the curriculum without adding a new subject, but by making changes in the substance of courses already within various compartments of the curriculum. Philip H. Phenix of Columbia University suggests in his classic book Realms of Meaning that curriculum for general education should ideally comprise six basic realms or areas. They are symbolic (language, mathematics, and non-discursive symbolic forms), empirics (physical sciences, social sciences), esthetics (music, literature, the visual arts, and the arts of movement), synnoetics (personal knowledge), ethics (moral knowledge), and synoptics (history, religion, philosophy).

This design of Prof. Phenix is of course only one of many possible designs, but all view curriculum not as list of courses, but as a building block.

Using this particular design, human rights can be introduced into the curriculum through three areas: empirics (cases of violations of human rights), synnoetics (the subjective meaning of violation of human rights for the victims), and ethics (norms of human rights).

Within each of these three curricular areas, there are a number of courses which can be used to transport materials related to human rights.

I find synnoetics enriching and useful. In his introduction, Prof. Phenix stated that it embraces what Michael Polanyi called "personal knowledge", and referred to by Martin Buber as "I-Thou"-relational insight.

According to Phenix, the Greek word synnoetics means "mediative thought", and is the compound of syn (with) and noesis (cognition). To me it simply means insight into inter-subjective relationships. It is a curricular area within which students are stimulated to understand themselves and to understand each other.

The problem in teaching within the area of synnoetics is that there is no particular discipline available for this purpose. Phenix suggests that works of literature, especially tragic drama, and arts be used to stimulate the growth of this subjective and intersubjective insights within students.

His reason is that great works of literature and arts are portrayals of life. The art in teaching synnoetics is how to guide students to grasp the meaning of various situations of human life portrayed by the great authors and artists in their works.

Treating curriculum development as an exercise in adding and subtracting courses from a list will never generate a meaningful educational program.

Realizing that every proposal cannot be downloaded into a curriculum is a first step. Indonesian students have only so much time for learning and only so much capacity for learning.

If the essentials of a curricular structure are defined carefully and with insight, students will learn all that is necessary to guide themselves further through the various life situations they will meet after leaving school.

The writer is an observer of social and cultural affairs.