Putting fun back into education

Putting fun back into education

Tantri Yuliandini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

What Dony remembers about his elementary school days in Sydney
is the immense fun he had and the games he played while at his
Australian school.

When it comes to what the 24 year old recollects about his
school days back here in his homeland, however, he puts it in two
words.

"No fun!"

If anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, there is something
seriously wrong with the national education system, Most of the
people The Jakarta Post interviewed recently said the only fun
part of school was found outside of school hours.

"During school we had to memorize things all the time ... the
pace of the lessons was much too fast, before we could understand
one we were already forced to learn the next lesson," Dony, now a
student at Brawijaya University in Malang, East Java, said.

Others said the only enjoyable part of school was meeting
friends, and extracurricular activities, such as the marching
band and the school magazine.

"I had fun (in school) because of other factors, because of my
friends and because I'm laid-back by nature, so I don't let the
stressful lessons get to me," said Sena, 24, a University of
Indonesia student.

Child psychologist Seto Mulyadi said this attitude of students
indicates the failure of the education system to instill a love
of learning.

"Students are only happy when the school bell rings, when
they're outside school. This is exactly the reason why we should
revamp our education system," he said.

The effective way to learn is through enjoyable experiences,
Seto said, explaining that a child learns most effectively when
cognition is combined with the affective, or with feelings, and
the psychomotoric, or elements of movements and activities.

"The songs you remember most are those you hear when you're
feeling happy, when you're in love. And it's through outbound
experiences that adults easily grasp leadership values. Why do
you think that is?"

Sena said the lessons he most remembers were those he learned
when in elementary school because they were the most basic, "They
were the ones that were most applicable in real life.

"The additions and subtractions are those I mostly use even
now -- what do I care about sine, cosine and tangent?"

He believes the failure of education here is due to the fact
that the teacher never tries to help the student understand the
importance of a lesson by showing the relationship between theory
and practice.

Children love learning, they love discovering new things, and
it is only after they become "institutionalized" in a rigid
system that they start having reservations about learning, Seto
said.

"In only three years (of life) a child can absorb 80 percent
of his mother's language, no matter how difficult, because they
are taught with love and affection, there's no such thing as
failure," he said, explaining that only when failure enters a
child's vocabulary is a phobia of school created.

The real aim of education, Seto believes, is to change
behavior from ignorance to awareness, to be aware of abstract
concepts and of good morals, instead of having theories drummed
into passive students.

"This aim is often misinterpreted, as if the child is (there)
for the school, the child is (there) for the curriculum, it
should be the other way around, we don't live to learn but learn
to live," he said.

Furthermore, each person is created differently, including
with different interests, and even the ability to absorb lessons
and experiences varies from person to person. Each child should
be approached with different teaching methods and taught with
their individual best interests in mind, Seto said.

The government should allow each school to modify and form its
own curriculum, according to the children's needs, and limit its
role in providing broad guidelines, he added.

The sobering reality now is that children as small as three or
four years old are already taught to read, write and do
mathematics.

Harini, a mother of a four-year-old boy, is concerned at
seeing her son being already taught to write in script, composing
complete sentences and doing mathematical equations, in his first
year of kindergarten.

"Truthfully, I don't approve (of the method) but the teacher
said that if they don't give such lessons, my child will never
get into a good elementary school," she said, explaining that
many schools expect children to already know the skills before
entering first grade.

The situation creates a vicious cycle, of the child going to
school and studying only because it is the only way to get to the
next level of schooling, and eventually to a well-paid job.

The repressive situation is why children never seem to enjoy
their school experience, and in the case of Dony, after returning
home, he had to repeat a grade because he could not keep up with
the lessons.

Sena has his own way of dealing with the problem. "That's
easy. When a lesson stresses me out, I just skip the class," he
said with a laugh.