Redefining multicultural education

By A. Chaedar Alwasilah

BANDUNG (JP): The social unrest, conflicts with religious overtones and political uncertainties which are blighting the country indicate that Indonesians are still immature in running their nation.

They are still in a "childhood" stage of nation building, characterized by weak bureaucracy and governance, public mistrust of the government and suspicion of the Armed Forces.

All this stems from the ignorance of former president Soeharto's regime of the exigency of democratic and political education in a multicultural setting in which an individual or group has more than one set of cultural beliefs, values and attitudes.

Given that Indonesia is a multicultural, multilingual and multireligious society, our educational system should, to a considerable extent, serve the well-being of our pluralistic society.

In this context, education should be aimed at developing citizens who are sensitive to cultural pluralism. In other words, the benefits of educational programs must be distributed to a wider range of individuals. The concept of benefit distribution is elaborated as follows:

* Benefits are not confined to economic or financial gains. Instead, they encompass social, religious and psychological benefits.

Encouraging the teaching of minor languages and local traditional arts, for example, provides social and cultural benefits, as well as giving the local population pride in their traditions. So does allowing students to perform their religious faiths in schools.

The present curricular policy of "local content" should be perceived as the government's attempt to accommodate the traditions of the people.

* Around 60 percent of the population live in rural areas, thus suggesting that education should be aimed at empowering this majority. Educational empowerment entails providing students with knowledge and survival skills required for functioning to their fullest in their immediate milieu.

School children in Bali, for example, are introduced to aspects of tourism such as local arts, acting as a tour guide, hotel and travel management, and foreign languages.

The implementation of a decentralized educational policy has long been overdue. Such a policy is believed to be the informed solution to general education and vocational education problems prevalent in Indonesia's multicultural and multilingual society.

* Multicultural education values a mutual understanding of the cultural beliefs, values and attitudes of different ethnic groups in a country. While in the United States, the teaching of a foreign language such as Spanish is said to encourage cultural pluralism, in the Indonesian context learning other ethnic languages is not a wise recommendation.

Instead, it is much more worthwhile and practical to incorporate the comparative religions, cultural beliefs, values and attitudes of different ethnic groups into the curriculum of geography and social studies.

* While the teaching of minor languages is recommended, the teaching of the Indonesian language should be given the utmost priority. It is through this national language that all ethnic groups engage in interethnic communication.

Any ethnic group allowed to promote its ethnic language at the expense of the national language is not only self-isolating, but also dismissive of the potential social, cultural and political benefits enjoyed by other ethnic groups.

The mastery of the Indonesian language is the surest way of gaining access to these benefits.

* In multicultural settings, interethnic competitions in all walks of life are natural and unavoidable.

Indonesia is already entering the ever-changing and vastly competitive global society, and to survive global competition it must first survive national competitions.

Interethnic competitions should be perceived as an internal triggering mechanism that will propel the nation forward without necessarily leading to interethnic conflicts.

In situations where competition turns to conflict, multicultural education must play its role of nurturing and practicing pluralistic thoughts; promoting interethnic communication to minimize misunderstanding, suspicion, distrust and stereotyping; and upholding justice and fairness in competition.

* Multicultural education necessitates democratic political education. Politics provides citizens with an awareness of their rights and obligations, and democratic political education strikes the balance between the two.

General elections are a medium of propagating democracy by letting people gain what they deserve and teaching respect for what other people gain -- exactly what the fifth principle of Pancasila teaches, social justice for all Indonesians.

Unfortunately this principle was not understood by the past government. The general elections during the Soeharto regime were orchestrated to favor Golkar, the government-supported party.

As everybody recalls, the citizens were politically ridiculed and thus became the pawns of government officials and the military.

The government virtually uprooted and eradicated the values of fairness, justice, legality and impartiality, which are known to all religious teachings. The bureaucracy did not realize that people's conscience, self-esteem and pride were hurt, resulting in a loss of trust in the government.

The clearly-drawn characteristics of multicultural education may facilitate educators, curriculum developers and educational policy markers in developing programs that reflect the multiculturalism of Indonesia.

As a rule of thumb, all educational activities should be tailored with the following intentions: to remedy ethnocentrism, to build mutual understanding among racial and cultural groups and to teach an appreciation of their cultures, to eradicate intergroup and interethnic tensions and conflicts, and to make the curriculum relevant to the experiences and cultural traditions of the nation.

At lower levels of schooling, for example, multicultural themes can be promoted in the classroom through articles from newspapers and magazines; relevant pictures, books, records and poems; performing plays about various groups; developing multicultural calendars; learning songs in different minor languages; and making maps showing the origins of various groups.

More techniques can be added to the above list. The multicultural educational model proposed above is not new to many readers. However, it is now high time for its actualization as Indonesians consciously, collectively and deliberately attempt to remedy their beloved yet socially conflicted nation.

The writer is a lecturer at Bandung Teachers Training Institute in West Java.