Education bill reduces national education to religious matters
Education bill reduces national education to religious matters
Moch. N. Kurniawan
The Jakarta Post
Jakarta
Despite strong criticism and opposition from numerous parties,
the government and the House of Representatives looked set to go
ahead with the controversial education system bill, which would
reduce national education to religious matters.
The bill, with a minor change in its latest version, fell
short of identifying the agents of education and defining the
intelligence, as opposed to the behavioral, factor as the main
goal of national education, and instead stipulated that the main
goal of national education was to create faithful and devoted
citizens.
Education is a vast field, but in its various aspects, it can
be divided into formal and informal education. Formal education
aims at increasing the knowledge and skills of educational
recipients and is provided by educational institutions, while
informal education, including ethics and morality, falls within
the responsibility of society.
One thing the bill fails to cover, and which omission sparked
strong criticism from education experts and professionals, is the
important role families and religious institutions play in
encouraging learning.
According to education experts, families and religious
institutions should play an active role as agents of education,
because they are part of students' daily environment, and
therefore, religious education should not be entrusted to
educational institutions.
"The thesis is that moral decadence should not be blamed on
educational institutions, but on families and religious
institutions which assume responsibility in religious education.
The prevalent corrupt, collusive and nepotistic practices should
not be blamed on formal education institutions, which have been
accused of failing to educate their graduates to behave well,"
education expert Mochtar Buchori said recently.
Article 13 of the bill focuses on students' right to religious
education, and requires schools to recruit special teachers to
provide religious instruction for their students. Critics say
this stipulation is erroneous, because this responsibility should
fall on families and religious institutions, including mosques,
churches and temples.
Rev. I. Ismartono of the Bishop Conference of Indonesia (KWI)
concurred and said that the government and the House should
hastily endorse the bill to avoid causing friction in society.
"It's regretful that the bill reduces national education to
religious matters," he said.
The House was schedule to endorse the bill on May 2 to mark
National Education Day.
The bill also stipulates that the principle of equality in the
national education system had indeed retained the discriminative
practice of allowing religious organizations to run their own
educational institutions.
The problem as to why Muslim students go to Christian schools,
or vice versa, should not be solved through the contentious
Article 13, because it went against religion-based school
missions.
The ruling should prevail for state-run schools and
universities.
A minor change has been already made but it does not solve the
problem. With the minor change, the recruitment of special
teachers for religious instructions is mandatory for schools with
ten students or more.
"It will, for example, force Catholic schools to admit less
than 10 Muslim students to avoid the obligation.
Such issues in the education bill has sparked a number of
religious leaders and education experts to call for a delay of
the planned endorsement of the bill in May.
The bill also requires citizens between the ages of seven and
15 to undertake religious education according to their faith, but
it does not determine who should assume this responsibility.