Educational missing link a problem

Educational missing link a problem

By Ignas Kleden

JAKARTA (JP): Education should mean both schooling and
learning in the broader sense. This has to be so because we
cannot separate the matter-of-fact implementation of the school
system from its normative ideals.

Schooling refers to instruction which aims to transfer
knowledge and skills to create an ability to provide added value
to goods and services. In this sense, schooling is almost
identical with training.

Learning is personality-building; the transfer of norms and
values, through which added value is given to the students
themselves.

The normative content of education cannot be ruled out if we
want to understand the school system. The ancient Greeks' schole
of more than two millennia ago was a learning forum undertaken in
their leisure time. It was done outside everyday-life activities,
which were related to production for living and reproduction of
society. Schools were set up in order that people could
dissociate themselves from pragmatic tasks and concentrate on
learning which targeted the development of personalities, wisdom
and human virtues.

Learning is aimed to provide people with values and norms,
knowledge and wisdom, in order that they are able to render their
life meaningful. Of course the advent of industry has changed the
school system. People start to talk about formal and non-formal
education, in a sense which totally reverses the original idea of
the Greek schole. Formal education entails providing its
participants with both civilized standards and the ability to
engage in industrial production. But this has progressed to the
extent that critical observers tend to call current school
systems all over the world "factory-style schools".

According to Alvin Toffler, who coined the term, schools of
this sort aim to produce three basic qualities in the
participants, namely punctuality, obedience and the willingness
to do repetitive work. Punctuality is needed because industry
operates according to a strict time-table. Obedience is required
because within industry workers are expected to perform what is
decided for them, and not to discuss or to question it. The
willingness to do repetitive work is very important because in
industry one has to do the same work for a very long time.

These qualities are imbued within formal education through
homework tests, and examinations. The empirical separation of
training from education, which has occurred in most schools
throughout the world, has led radical thinkers such as Ivan
Illich to launch his controversial campaign on deschooling. In
order for one to be able to live the original idea of schooling,
Illich argues, one has to unlearn what one has learned so far
within the formal education system and dissociate oneself from
the hidden agenda of the formal school system.

Though deschooling is a dramatic critique of the general
concept of industry-oriented education, we must not be scared by
its apocalyptic undertone. The message is still the same, namely
that it is impossible to separate schooling and training from its
educational purposes.

Needless to say, we have to find out methods and didactical
techniques to bring the formal schools back to their original
educational raison d'etre. Central to this is the importance of
teaching an ability to think. One of the basic ways to
differentiate trained people from the untrained is that the
former can think and take action independently.

This is made possible by means of splitting the thinking
process into logical steps, each of which can be checked and
scrutinized through logical examination. In that sense
instructions within formal schools always have a double purpose
and a double effect. On the one hand they aim to provide learning
materials in a methodical way which facilitate both the reception
and the understanding of the material. On the other hand however,
through the methodical learning of those materials, the students
are trained to improve their ability to think logically.

The success of intellectual education can be measured by
examining how the two abilities are provided to the students.
This is clear enough, since independent creativity without
material knowledge will produce a student who can think correctly
while knowing anything. Conversely, material capacity without
formal thinking will only produce a student who, like a book,
possesses in him/herself a large amount of knowledge while being
unable to think logically. The question is then: how can we
combine the two intellectual approaches of the learning process
and how can we help students produce the two capacities by
themselves? One answer is that we have to give more attention to
the techniques of instruction, to the didactical methods and to
the creation of a productive and critical atmosphere during the
learning hours in schools.

However, one should not forget that learning as such is not
only a pedagogical but also a social product. This implies, the
atmosphere within the learning conditions can only be fruitful if
they are supported by the macro sociopolitical conditions outside
schools. There is no use in training students to think logically,
to speak systematically, to argue clearly and to examine
everything critically, if all those capacities are not
sufficiently esteemed in sociopolitical life. If one notices that
to keep quiet is more rewarding than to speak one's opinions, one
will very soon become inclined to shut up rather than put forward
one's opinion. At this juncture, whether we like it or not, we
will be faced with the fact that the ability to think logically
can develop if one gets used to thinking in that way.

The habit of thinking logically will come if there is enough
opportunity to train logical thinking. In a sense, the habit of
thinking logically depends not only on natural ability but also
on the courage to do so. The courage to think logically will come
about if there are enough opportunities to do so. However the
opportunity and the courage to think logically and to persist in
it depend very much on sociopolitical conditions. That is why one
basic criterion to measure the seriousness of educational
undertaking is to see how logical thinking and the critical
attitude are allowed and encouraged or inhibited and discouraged.

But talking about logic without bothering with the
corresponding political conditions which support it will result
in perpetuating the missing link between education and real life,
for the former is very much expected to be a preparation for the
latter.

The writer is a sociologist now working with the SPES
Foundation Research Center.