New minds for knowledge-based society

By Bambang Hidayat

Following are excerpts from a paper presented at a seminar on education in Jakarta on March 15, 2001. The seminar was jointly organized by The Asia Foundation, Basis cultural magazine, Kanisius publishing company and The Jakarta Post.

JAKARTA (JP): Human society in the 21st century faces the daunting yet inspiring task of forging a relationship with the natural world. New concepts emerge about global trends concerning population, development and environment.

Within these concepts it is implied that meeting current human needs is paramount, while at the same time preserving the environment and natural resources needed for later generations cannot be ignored.

In practice, we encourage integration of academic research into market demands with a price on the role and credibility of scientists, academics and administrators. This is important to build up the integrity of scientists, legislatures and the leadership of society in making decisions.

Accordingly, education must also respond to the new age. Clearly, attempts to revise, to reorder, restructure, reshape and other forms of tinkering with curriculums should adapt to the sweeping changes now taking place in contemporary society.

The highly complex post-industrial society demands new knowledge and skill and, as a matter of fact, new human traits for adapting and for meeting the conditions of urban life. To be proficient at "doing science" our students in the future must be able "to think like scientists" and engage in scientific inquiry.

This ability may be acquired by focusing on the development of intellectual skill labeled as "processes of science". This includes observation, classifying, knowing space-time relationships, using numbers, inferring, predicting and communicating.

These are worthy skills when taught in the context of problem- solving which is meaningful to students, less so when taught as independent or isolated skills. Needless to say, proficiency in the Indonesian language is a must, and we have expounded the views that a written account is necessarily distinct from oral language.

Any reform of education in the sciences is meaningless unless it is in harmony with the character of today's demands and to our emerging knowledge-intensive society. Of equal concern is of course the failure of school science curriculums to respond to changes in the image and ethos of postmodern science. Therefore reforming a curriculum is not a simple affair but needs visionary judgment.

We know, for example, that computer courses have sprung up everywhere. However we should emphasize that computers, are essentially members of a modern research team.

Computers, we have to realize, are "clever idiots", can summarize what is known or not known very quickly, or outlining problems, can prepare models derived from data. They can also continuously organize additional data from other research teams which are sometimes scattered throughout the world.

What we should be aware of is that the pooling of minds serves to broaden the context for generating a flow of ideas and for extending the significance of any findings.

Examples of natural and social scientists working together are already found in problems relating to the management of our natural environment, stabilizing the world's human population growth, controlling the AIDS pandemic and genetic treatment of human diseases. Cooperation in this case is a term which will never become redundant in the future.

Not long ago, we may remember, how many disciplines were joined together to help mitigate the disastrous effects caused by El Nino and La Nina. The atmospheric phenomenon was not the concern of meteorologists only but the business of people from many walks of life, as its impacts could have affected many sectors of society.

Therefore the monodisciplinary solution would not be the most adequate one. Social values and ethical issues are seen as a relevant dimension to our scientific conducts in the coming decades. These attributes are observable in the research on problems related to biotechnology, human behavior and how human organisms interact within the social environment.

In the fast-growing demands one should not forget the maxim of becoming experts first, and generalists later, not the other way round! (We should not be trapped by the Chairman Mao dictum in the 1970s: red first, expert later). One must be able to show one's identity or firm track in life before synthesizing phenomena or problems. This is equally true in the process of filling a cabinet post.

One purpose of science education in the 21st century remains to be identified as the development of responsible citizenship for dealing with problems that embrace dimensions in science and technology such as those related to the environment. This is in fact the ethics of the 21st century: health, energy and agriculture.

Teachers should be concerned and prepared to address with their students their experiences in a context that extends beyond the laboratory and the boundaries of conventional disciplines, but still within the realm of scientific validity. In a geography lesson, for example, they cannot merely tell the students that the Ciliwung river runs through Jakarta. Instead they must also impart their knowledge on the biochemistry, on possible bacterial content of the Ciliwung and the problems of pollution.

A particular critical dimension is the nation's transition from an industrial economy to one that is knowledge-intensive. Those who master the knowledge will ultimately win the race. We must be ready, preparing new minds for a new age which will require a new model of science curriculum development, one that is more holistic in conception. Here science teaching emphasizes "the optimal utilization of knowledge" and blurs the present distinction between schooling and the real world, a vision of science education that presents science and technology as a part of the lives of our young people.

Thus the essence of educational policy is characterized by a greater emphasis on introducing the process of scientific endeavor, rather than memorizing techniques or facts alone, and also greater participation and involvement of the lay public and inseminating science as a social institution.

Under these circumstances a major goal of science education becomes enculturation, in which education in the sciences is linked to the prevailing scientific-and-technological society. Students should more and more feel the need for information, rather then giving them the burden of listening to boring facts.

They should be trained to argue not on the bases of "I am right", but to accommodate the views of their opponents, be trained to accept partnership, not on the bases of "like or dislike", and to see clear goals.

The writer is a former director of the Bosscha Observatory and chairman of the Astronomy Department at the Bandung Institute of Technology.