Orientation weeks are just hazing sessions

Simon Marcus Gower, Executive Principal, High/Scope, Jakarta

A recent email message from a high school student reads, "I hate the way they treat us at this school. Every year it is just the same. Orientation weeks in my school are just a nightmare." It seems like a terrible reflection on the state of schools in Indonesia. These comments and others like them have been received over the past few weeks, as new school years have been getting underway.

Do they reflect students' unreasonable expectations of their schools or do they represent a genuine concern and need for improvement in the way that schools are managed?

Educators could just dismiss these kinds of reflections as the natural misgivings of students beginning a new school year. However, such convenience does not exist for educators here. These complaints about the behavior exhibited in schools during orientation weeks represent something that are at best regrettable but more likely unnecessary, foolish and even foolhardy in the potential damage that it may do to the students who are subjected to this, at times, ridiculous behavior.

The kind of foolish antics that both seniors and teachers are prone to get up to during orientation weeks represent nothing short of the kind of offensive "hazing" that has been exhibited in military boot camps. Seniors often take pleasure in humiliating their juniors in school.

In almost every circumstance, this kind of behavior has to be looked upon as also quite offensive and even disgraceful. What makes this behavior even more disgraceful and even more unacceptable is the manner in which quite often teachers stand aside, watch and even condone this kind of behavior.

Students are always liable to behave in childish ways and play pranks and practical jokes on each other. But often in Indonesia childish behavior is allowed to go unchecked and pranks are permitted that can be damaging and represent something very similar to bullying.

The kinds of childish antics include insisting that peers walk about with nothing on their feet and run the risk of injury. Boys will be required to wear girls clothes and even make-up. It is hard to imagine what educational value is to be found in such behavior.

Girls too are liable to experience things that are less than useful to their school lives. At one school in Jakarta the girls from one class in the school were called upon to visit the teachers' staff room. They went along thinking that the purpose of this visit was to introduce them to teachers. They went back to class in tears.

The purpose of their visit to the teachers' room was to present an aggressive warning demanding obedience and "appropriate behavior" from them throughout their time within the school. The teachers had considered it appropriate to shout and scream at the girls, making them leave the staff room in a state of literal nervous shock.

What, effectively, these school girls had experienced would be better placed in an army training camp, rather than a school that is supposed to be welcoming and introducing its students to a learning environment within which they should feel comfortable and well supported.

Teachers that conduct themselves within this kind of mentality, with this kind of disrespect for their students are living in the past. They are living in an environment that does not treat students with respect; instead it considers students to be objects; to be little more than creatures that must be controlled, that must be put in their place and that is a place immediately and emphatically beneath their seniors and most of all beneath their teachers.

Educators that are stuck with this kind of mentality are educators that fail both themselves and their students. They are living in a world in which they think it is appropriate to command and demand respect rather than showing that they are worthy of respect and earning respect through their actions. They are then, in short, doing far more damage than good.

Educators must be respectful of their students. By showing that they possess this kind of respectful and honorable mentality towards their students, (towards those for whom they are responsible for in education), they are showing an example which will benefit the students and allow them to pass on the life enhancing and honorable character trait of respect for others.