Educators must recognize their social, psychological obligations

Simon Marcus Gower, Principal, Harapan Bangsa High School, Tangerang, Banten

The following is the complaint of one teacher with over ten years of experience teaching in Jakarta high school.

"I'm a teacher. I teach the material in the book, that's all I can do really. I don't have time to do anything more. I know this is not good for my students, but what can I do? At the end of the school day, I go home and then go to my other job. The pay isn't enough as a teacher."

These are the rather sad and even prophetic words. Viewed over the long-term, what is being prophesied is nothing short of a failure of education and a failure for the students. It is clear that many schools, teachers and students still exist with the overbearing pressures to meet curriculum targets and cram in as much content as possible.

In these conditions, almost inevitably, teachers will "teach the material in the book" and fail to consider the students and their human needs.

The 'human needs' of school students can be great too. They are, after all, in the very vulnerable and sensitive formative years of their lives. Each day they will be experiencing new thoughts, ideas and feelings. Inevitably the students' emotional state will be an influencing factor in their school life but too often the emotional and mental welfare of students in Indonesia is not sufficiently thought of and cared for.

Learning and education has developed to appreciate, and try to understand as much as possible, alternative forms of intelligence. Now it is quite common and entirely reasonable for educators to talk of multiple-intelligence and consider the emotional intelligence of students but as yet these concepts still seem quite obscure to Indonesian teachers and education planners.

In essence within Indonesian schools today, teachers and students are still caught up in a whirlwind of knowledge and information that has to be presented and mostly memorized, whilst true understanding and learning seems to be only on the periphery of what is happening in schools. Students are overwhelmed by both too many subjects to study, and too much to be studied within each of those subjects.

In this context the maxim, and guiding philosophy, of 'less is more' seems to apply and if only it were applied school students could both enjoy their school lives more and ultimately achieve far more successful and long lasting learning. It seems, however, that schools exist within the notion of pushing more and more upon the students that leaves the students dumbfounded and even affected detrimentally psychologically.

The kinds of mental pressures that are exerted on students to perform and attain high scores can, in fact, leave mental scares. Take the example of one second year high school student, she had been achieving some very good scores for her school work but halfway through the academic year she was struggling to keep up with the breadth and depth of subjects that she needed to study to attain the grades she wanted and needed. Finally this pressure took its toll and her scores dropped.

So great was the mental burden that had been placed on her to perform that this drop in her scores lead to nothing short of a mental breakdown. She wept openly in front of her friends and teachers and long sessions of counseling were required to get her to feel a little better about herself and be able to return to her classes.

The burden of expectancy plus the burden of an over congested school timetable had conspired to render her a nervous wreck. The tears flowed and her whole body shook with the nerve shattering experience that she had had.

This 'nerve shattering experience' is one that will probably live on in her memory for quite some time but it is also indicative of a major problem for Indonesian educators. Too great a concentration on the presentation and acquisition of knowledge leaves the great responsibilities that educators have for the development of psychologically balanced and socially aware students and young adults on the sideline.

But the reality is that schools and teachers have to have some skills in educational psychology and they must be able to help develop their students socially. When a child first enters a school it is, in essence, that child's first encounter with society. It is a first opportunity to see where they fit into a wider community.

It is a first opportunity to make more friends and it is a first place at which to learn of social responsibility. But these opportunities for human interaction are often neglected and not fully capitalized on by educators to provide positive learning experiences that will help the child grow as a student and develop psychologically and intellectually.

Educators are entrusted with an enormous responsibility to look out for and offer guardianship for the social growth and psychological well-being of school students. Having been entrusted with this responsibility it is incumbent on educators to enhance students' social and psychological experiences.

This s not to suggest that they must manipulate their students or engage in mind games, but it does mean that they have to fully exercise care and guardianship to ensure that students are not detrimentally affected or afflicted by what they encounter in schools. Ultimately a school is a social entity; it is a community into which people must try to fit and actively participate and hopefully succeed.

At present in Indonesia, however, the social context of schools and schooling is not sufficiently recognized. The pressure of too much to learn in too many subjects carries with it the potential stigma of failure that can harm psychological welfare and undermine intellectual development.

Psychologists recognize that true peace of mind most often emanates from human connection and interaction. Educators should be wise enough to similarly recognize that true peace of mind creates a conducive condition for learning to take place. So by nurturing social interaction in schools, teachers can help foster a social and mental state that will intrinsically help their students to learn.

Indonesian teachers would surely benefit from giving greater thought to their social and psychological responsibilities and that benefit may be passed on to their students in the form of a better school life.