Riots tell of need for a learning society

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.