Modifying universal principles to suit the demands of culture

Mochtar Buchori, Jakarta

It has been said that education is culture-bound. It means, among other things, that there is no simple cultural borrowing in education. Any educational principle or policy that proves successful in one culture cannot be simply copied and transplanted into another culture. To succeed, any attempt to replicate an educational policy must be based on a deep understanding concerning the cultural differences between the country of origin and the borrowing country.

Today, most of us agree that our education is in a mess. Not only is education expensive and inaccessible to the poor, but its quality is lower than that of our neighboring countries. And the greater part of our school teachers do not meet the minimum standard of teaching competence defined by the Ministry of National Education. Nobody likes this situation, and all of us want to see this situation corrected as soon as possible.

Within this kind of social climate there are those among us who would like to take shortcuts to improve our education. We have been urged to copy whatever has been done by our neighbors to end this mediocrity, and replace it with an excellent quality education.

This is a temptation that we must resist. There is one clear lesson from our past which shows that changes which were introduced hurriedly into our system without considering the capability of our culture to sustain it will do us more harm than good.

When we introduced the method of objective-type test -- true and false, multiple choice, matching -- in our schools to replace the old essay and oral examination, what was our ultimate gain? Have we made progress, or have we moved backward? Today most of our children can neither read nor write well. They cannot speak well either. Is this progress or regress?

Another innovation that has affected our system in a rather negative way was the introduction of an educational guidance and counseling center in our schools. When we decided to install this center nation-wide, did we do it after considering both the positive and negative impacts, or did we do it merely because of it looked impressive?

In some schools guidance and counseling personnel are being degraded by the principal to become school police or school spies. This unwanted byproduct is caused, in my view, by hasty decisions made before we really understand the nature and function of this unit, and before we know its proper place in the entire school system.

This is only one simple example showing the intricacies associated with transfer of educational techniques in trans- cultural setting. More dramatic examples can be found in the literature of educational innovations.

The success of the Japanese in introducing Western education into the Japanese educational tradition conducted during the Meiji Restoration (1868 -- 1912) was uniquely Japanese, and very culture-bound. No country can replicate this successful innovation without understanding the Japanese culture and mind-set. When Turkey under Kemal Pasha Attaturk attempted to carry out a similar experiment (1923 -- 1938) it met with fierce resistant from traditional Islamic leaders.

Until today this so-called Western -- Islamic divide within the Turkish society is still visible, and attempts to unite the European and the Islamic parts of the nation bring only partial success.

These are two examples of how culture can hamper attempts at educational innovation.

The first example -- i.e. the Indonesian failure to modernize the evaluation system and to introduce a guidance and counseling center into the school system -- illustrates a barrier that has come from our traditional school culture. This barrier remained unbroken for a fairly long time.

The second example -- i.e. the Japanese success in modernizing its educational system without breaking the Japanese tradition, and the Turkish failure in modernizing its educational, political, and legal system simultaneously -- illustrates a cultural force that in the Japanese case backed up the idea of modernizing a nation, but in the Turkish case thwarted a national attempt toward modernization. This formidable cultural force is deeply rooted in the history and traditions of a nation.

The point I wish to emphasize here is that in education simple cultural borrowing is simply not the way to introduce innovation. If any borrowing has to be made it has to be done with the greatest care, giving great attention to the problem of cultural capability to absorb and nurture the innovation to be introduced.

Today, in our desire to remedy the ills in our education as quickly as possible there is a strong temptation to replicate policies that have proved to be successful in other nations. We have been pressured to replicate policies that have brought about successes in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, China, India and Vietnam.

I do not know whether we must consider ourselves fortunate or unfortunate in being so slow in our response to these proddings. On the whole, I feel that it is better to be a little bit too dilatory than too hurried in responding to political proddings of this kind. In education it is better to spend time examining the capacity of the system to absorb and sustain a premeditated change rather than rush into changes that cannot be sustained and will later on damage the system.

Are there not universal principles in education that can be applied in any society regardless of its race, culture, and religion? I do not know! What I know is that there are universal principles at the philosophical level, but not at the level of implementation. There are universal principles of education, but there are to the best of my knowledge no universal principles in educational management and administration.

There is the principle, for instance, which says that to prepare the young generation for the task of rescuing the nation from its current maladies it is imperative that education lights the fire of hope in the minds of the young. But how do you light such a fire? And how do you keep such a fire alive in the midst of distressing situations? There is no universal guidance on how to do these things. This is something that is really bound by culture, and sometimes even bound by personalities.

Thus, we can invite experts to help us improve our educational system, but in the end we must think it through and correct whatever imperfections there are in our educational system.

The writer has a doctorate in education from Harvard University.