Education for obedience or cultivation of creativity

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): Obedience has two faces: good and bad. The good face is that obedience is the basis for discipline. The bad face is that it can also be the source of passivity and excessive conformity.

Carried out unwisely, education for obedience can cause students to lose their courage and ability to think independently. They will become dependent on others (persons, institutions, or authorities) for the solutions to the social problems they are facing.

They will become passive participants in most social events, always waiting for instructions, orders and approval from above to embark upon any social action.

The crucial question in this respect is: What do we teach our students to get them to obey? Ultimately the aim of education for obedience is, in my opinion, to impart into the students the ability to contribute to the maintenance of order within the society.

This will be accomplished only if, at the end, students are able to give their obedience and their respect to the values and norms that uphold social order.

Obedience for the sake of obedience itself is dangerous. It can lead to "dumb obedience" (kepatuhan yang dungu). Who needs this kind of obedience? No one, except demagogues.

What is badly needed is critical and creative obedience, i.e. the ability to participate in the maintenance and promotion of social order, which is accompanied by the ability to identify shortcomings that exist in one's environment and also the ability to generate new ideas concerning how to improve the existing reality in one's environment.

It is the lack of balance between education for obedience and education for creativity that led me to say the following in February 1989: "In my opinion we have been practicing an educational system which gives too much emphasis to the cultivation of obedience and not enough attention to the cultivation of creativity.

"This is in spite of our common knowledge that creativity is a very important virtue in both our individual lives and the life of our nation. If we sincerely want our nation to become increasingly more capable and wiser in handling our development problems, then we must ensure that each generation becomes successively more creative than the one preceding it.

"It is certain, I think, that the generation we are educating in our schools today will have to face and solve problems that are much more complicated than the ones we have to deal with at present. These problems cannot be solved by methods and pro cedures we are now employing.

"These new problems will require new approaches and new methods, and these can be generated only if the upcoming generations become more creative than the present generation.

"Thus it is high time, I think, that we begin to tackle seriously the problem of inculcating creativity among our students."

What I failed to mention at that time is that the presence of creative people in our society cannot be considered as the product of our education. They have been there, and they will be there, in spite of our educational system. They were and are exceptional people.

What is then the point of advocating education for creativity?

To have more creative people in our society! It is wrong, I think, to depend entirely on exceptional people for the emergence of novelties that will enrich our social and cultural life. We also need the contribution of ordinary people to constantly renew obsolete things in our various systems.

To a certain extent every person can be educated to become more creative than what he or she actually is at present. Every normal person has within him or her the potential to be creative. This is a reality that has not been sufficiently recognized and augmented in our educational system.

I think that up to now we continue to fail to give sufficient attention to this problem. Our schools, from kindergarten to high school and university, are still directing the greater part of their attention to the task of teaching obedience. They do very little or nothing at all to stimulate and guide our students toward becoming creative individuals. Some schools and teachers even spurn students with creative minds.

A number of years ago, for instance, one high school student was expelled from his school because, on his own initiative, he conducted a study concerning the practice of "living together" among university students in his town.

This caused a tremendous upset, not only among members of the teaching staff, but within the educational bureaucracy of the entire province as well. This particular student was accused of "transgressing the traditional norms of decency" and "showing no respect for the traditional culture."

The sad thing was that it was not only that particular student who was punished --expelled from his school-- but his father, a teacher at another high school, also had to bear the consequence. He was dismissed by the bureaucracy.

Who was "transgressing the traditional norms of decency" here? The university students who lived together, the landlords who allowed such practices, the student who conducted the inquiry, or the educational authority which was angered by this non- traditional way of learning?

What is the reason for all of this? I think that tradition, both social and educational tradition, constitutes the most powerful single factor that has created this situation. Teachers in Indonesia have become accustomed to orderly classroom situations in which obedient students listen attentively to every lecture and carry out every assignment dutifully.

This has created an educational tradition in which every teaching session is considered a solemn affair for which order should be maintained at all cost. In this way what prevails in the classroom is a climate which is dominated by awe and fear of the teachers.

Creativity cannot be nurtured in a situation dominated by fear. To inculcate creativity, schools and teachers must give students a certain amount of freedom. They must be allowed to generate and express "new ideas" and given the opportunity to explain the meaning or the origin of these "new ideas."

Such freedom will inevitably create a classroom situation, which cannot be called "orderly" by traditional standards. Such freedom will create so-called "wild situations" filled with excitement, jubilance or disappointment. But which is better: orderliness which creates blind obedience, or exuberant conduct which allows people the courage to express themselves responsibly?

Another requirement of education for creativity is that teachers should not impose their own "constructs", "designs", or ideas on the students. It is true that students should have mastered a certain amount of "basic constructs" or "standard constructs" before they can generate their own.

But these existing constructs should serve mainly as a basis or source for generating their own "ideations", and not as a repertoire of models to be copied. Copying is an act of imitation, not an act of creativity.

It is well to remember in this regard that in any good educational system, obedience, discipline and conformity are not the only concerns.

A good educational system is always characterized by a climate that spurs and encourages students to aspire toward a number of character ideals: love for knowledge and learning, the desire to search for wisdom, a respect for truth and a feeling for justice, among other things.

Obedience and creativity are basic ingredients that are equally indispensable for the development of such characteris tics.

The writer is a former deputy chairman of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. He is now rector of the Muhammadiyah University.