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.