Riots tell of need for a learning society

By Iwan Pranoto

BANDUNG (JP): The chaos in Jakarta and Surakarta several weeks ago cannot be erased easily from memory. It was so terrible.

Most of the victims were Indonesian citizens of Chinese descent. They were mobbed and tortured. One magazine even reported that one man was forced to rape his 14-year-old daughter in front of his family. That is insane. A lot of women of Chinese descent were raped or sexually abused at the time.

Some of them were raped in front of their parents, spouses or their own children. Some women chose to jump to their deaths rather than face being raped.

Other people probably have more traumatizing stories to tell. But nobody is able to explain exactly the pain suffered by the rape victims or their families. How can we explain the feelings of the father who had to rape his daughter?

To make matters worse, nobody seems to care enough about what tragically happened. Of course some NGOs are trying hard to help the victims. But up to now, no strong condemnation from the government has been heard. Why? Because it was acts against Indonesians of Chinese descent, so it makes it all right to torture them? Or perhaps because they were Chinese women, therefore it was right to rape them?

We used to think that things like this only happened in Yugoslavia, or some remote countries in Africa. We could not imagine that it could actually happen in Indonesia, in front of our own eyes. Indonesia is a country where its citizen talk about God and religion daily. It even has a national program on understanding and applying the state ideology Pancasila.

When the Serbs practiced ethnic cleansing several years ago, thousands of Indonesians were willing to go there to defend the helpless. And many Indonesians at that time sent large donations abroad to aid the Bosnian people.

But now, do we hear the same people condemning the rapes? Condemning our own ethnic cleansing? Why are we so quiet now? It is not a nation of angels, but a nation of angles. It is not based on moral values, but on power values. There is no place for the weak. It is very hard to explain why such chaos took place. But it is much harder to explain our silence in the aftermath.

The reasons lay in our education system. Both on micro and macro levels. Our education system has failed to form a learning society. As educators, it is our mission to fix the system now. We cannot turn away. We have to assure our wounded brothers and sisters that it will not happen again. Together we can change it to what we want. Let's start now!

In formal education, we still practice discrimination against some minorities. Besides that, we, implicitly at least, practice some kind of segregation in education. Or, we should say, provide some education opportunities based on race or religion. In my opinion, it is wrong. We cannot select or reject one student into a university because she or he belongs to some race or practices a particular religion.

For example, it is common to ask the race, religion and other irrelevant information of each applicant before she or he is accepted. The same questions are put formally and stated innocently on the application form for entering state universities (UMPTN) each year. It seems normal to ask such questions.

I am not an expert in law or human rights issues, but I think there are no legal reasons why such irrelevant data must be asked and submitted before the evaluation process begins. One may argue that the data is needed for statistics purposes. But if that is the case, unrelated information should be requested on a separate form and the applicant's name should not be put on the form, nor any other telltale marks.

At the same time, on the top level, the government seems to practice the same principle. The selection of ministers seems to follow a policy not solely based on expertise. In my opinion, we should be blind to race, gender and religion.

These types of discrimination, or any other type of discrimination, must be abolished. It is against one point of a political document stated by UNESCO in 1977 that every kind of education must be open to all. It cannot depend on status, sex, religion, race or others. It is also against one point of the Report of the Commission, UNESCO, in 1995, where it says that one important human value that must be promoted is the equality of opportunity in education.

These ill practices create segregationists. It would be ambitious to hope that we form a liberated society in togetherness. Because there are some barriers in entering state universities, minority students become concentrated in private universities. And now, according to some sources, a private university in Bandung has to apply its student selection criteria based on national race distribution too, otherwise the university will not be accredited.

It is ironic that a university as a spearhead of academic values is contaminated with practices of discrimination.

On the macro level, education should lead to a learning society. Modern education paradigm stresses lifetime learning. It states that the most important role of education is to facilitate participants to become lifetime learners.

And in this era of borderless countries, each person is required to live in peace with others of any nation. Of course, we cannot live together with people of another nation if we cannot live together as a united and integrated nation. Each person has to become a lifetime learner both in knowledge and social values.

Relating to the recent riots, we can say that our education system has failed to create a quality process on learning to live together. Our education system has neglected that particular learning pillar.

Our policymakers in education and perhaps some educators should share some of the blame. We overburden our students with subject materials. For example, kindergarten pupils have to start learning how to spell. Why don't they learn how to make a bed? Why don't they learn how to express agreement or disagreement?

In my opinion, these young kids have to start learning to live together from that age. The materials are important, but our first priority should not be to teach them how to spell, how to count, or even how to memorize Pancasila. Our first and primary priority should be to facilitate them to learn norms. They should learn fairness, honesty, respect and trust. And these norms cannot be learned solely from formal classes. They must be practiced in daily life. Society has to start providing examples of these values.

If our education system applied the above approach, one would be embarrassed to write phrases like "property of Moslems" or "property of indigenous people" when a riot takes place.

Now it is up to us when and how to heal the wounds and correct our education system to form a learning society. If we do not correct our education system now, there will be more violent and brutal acts taking place in the very near future. And by then, what we will have is a terminally ill society.

The writer is a lecturer at the Bandung Institute of Technology.