Good learning capability key to human resources development

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): Whether we are really serious about developing our human resources is a question that has been frequently asked of late. And whether we really understand the meaning and implications of "human resources development". Or do we merely use these three words to satisfy our appetite for slogans?

I don't mean to sound cynical, but the recent prevalence of so many calamities, disasters and accidents in our society within such a short time span has this question haunting me.

Consider the number of woes that occur regularly every year in our society: the chaotic handling of the routine haj expedition; the great confusion that occurs every Idul Fitri holiday when millions of Jakartans head to their home villages; the many highway accidents involving public transportation; the annual floods; the frequent accidents on construction sites; the presence of so many unwanted middlemen in bus terminals where every attempt to control and discipline them is defied, and so on, and so forth.

If we were really serious about our human resources development programs we would have learned something by now. We would have learned how to prevent extreme catastrophes like the Gurita ferry accident, to prevent the bank robberies and cases of embezzlement that seem to be routine matters now, and how to reduce financial losses suffered by state firms.

Or more positively, we must have learned how to improve our work performance. If we were really serious in developing our human resources, we would have learned how to increase job efficiency. Unfortunately there is no convincing evidence to indicate this. It thus seems that we have failed to learn anything significant from our past mistakes and misfortunes.

If I understand correctly, human resources development has always meant the enhancement of the capacity to learn. Thus logically, after years of national campaigns for human resources development, we should see a tangible improvement with regard to our national learning capability.

Yet what do we see? Repetition of past mistakes, which is a sure sign of failure in enhancing learning capabilities. There is a saying in Dutch that no donkey stumbles upon the same stone twice. Cynics would say then that we are worse than donkeys in our learning capability.

What is wrong with the way we learn?

To be fair, it must be acknowledged that communities within our society show widely differing degrees of learning capability. While on the whole our society does not show much learning dynamics, there are pockets within our society in which institutions and individuals are really fast learners. Within these pockets people and institutions seem to know which things are relevant and which should be considered irrelevant.

However, within the vast majority of our communities the situation seems to be that no significant learning dynamics takes place. In these communities it is very hard to find the phenomenon of innovation.

In this regard, several interesting phenomena are worth mentioning. The first of these is that on the whole our private sector seems to have been learning faster than the bureaucracy, and the difference in this regard is not diminishing but increasing.

If this trend is not halted or reversed, some people predict that we are going to have a dangerous situation, that we are going to have a mediocre bureaucracy which will have to deal with an increasingly sophisticated private sector.

Another interesting observation is that among the young generation, those working in the field of technology and engineering seem to learn faster than those working within the realm of business administration, who in turn learn faster than those working within the area of public administration.

One explanation that can be given to this phenomenon is that those working within the field of technology and engineering are much more exposed to change and innovation than those working within the fields of business and public administration. This may be one factor that creates a difference in learning motivation.

Another factor that may cause a very large segment of our society to lack enthusiasm and rigor in learning may have to do with attitude towards learning. My impression in this regard is that on the whole we do not feel the urgency for learning. We are not haunted by the feeling that we are ignorant about so many things in our life. We feel secure in our ignorance. This can be seen in our attitude towards television. For many of us television is primarily an entertainment medium, and not a learning medium.

Still another factor which may contribute to our low learning capacity is that we pay more attention to the symbolic attributes of learning rather than to the functional value of learning. Many young people prefer to pursue study programs which lead to degrees without competence, rather than pursuing study programs leading towards competence without degrees.

Finally, lack of knowledge about learning techniques may also be an important factor. For too many people within our society learning is identical to memorization. Just look at the way we always memorize and imitate sentences and phrases used by high- ranking government officials. No matter how absurd they may sound, these phrases must be memorized and imitated.

Even among university students there are many who try to learn by rote. It is this reliance upon memorization, I think, which makes us a nation with very low creativity. It should be remembered that imitation never leads to creativity.

The important question in this regard is: how to improve this situation? If we do not want a repetition of past mistakes, if we want to learn something from the ongoing changes around us, if we want to increase our efficiency, and if we want to constantly improve our performance, then it is imperative that we at least improve our learning capability. Without achieving a sufficient degree of learning capability, we will remain poor learners.

One problem in this regard is that learning capability has been taken for granted in many of our human resources development programs. No one has bothered to question whether the participants of such programs actually possess the necessary learning capability to pursue the programs to a fruitful end. And nobody seems to be interested in teaching people how to learn effectively, efficiently and rapidly in human resources development programs.

The writer is an observer of social and cultural affairs.