The benefits of conformity and creativity

By Marianus Kleden

KUPANG, East Nusa Tenggara (JP): The fact that the month of May has been pervaded by political euphoria marked by fervent campaigns by political parties does not annul our tradition of observing the month as a month of education.

Despite the coincidence of National Awakening Day on May 20 falling aptly on the second day of the official campaign period, one important thing to note is that education seems to conflict with politics, with the result that education has to yield to the demands and dominance of the political realm.

The academic calendar has been rescheduled according to the country's political agenda. It is quite ironic that academics, who fathered political reform, in the course of time are subjected to the whims of polities. What does this imply? At least one thing is quite obvious: Politics and education have influenced each other. Who gains more through the pain of the other is another question.

The long history of Indonesia's political system has long been a history of conformity, as has the history of education. While in the political arena citizens were forced to think monolithically, in the erudite world knowledge acquisition has been practiced almost always monologously.

Now that the monolithic orientation has metamorphosed into a pluralistic worldview, it is wondered whether education will begin to follow suit. In other words, should we now switch from our habit of telling students to memorize formulas and chronicles to an attitude of letting them explore and acquire information more independently? The answer is an assessment of cost and benefit of conformity and creativity.

Every aggregation is necessarily characterized by some degree of conformity. In human and animal aggregations uniformities (i.e. conformities) are genetically determined. And at a social level, conformity maintains and perpetuates our society, culture and civilization because through the process of socialization and internalization young members of society try to imitate and internalize standardized behavior (as relating to eating, socializing, eliminating, sex, etc.) as well as prevailing values and norms, and by so doing guarantee the survival and continuation of society.

From this perspective, education as a mechanism for conformity has contributed a lot to preserving society in its broadest sense: a family, a local community, a nation and a state. In our political past, ideological conformity bequeathed a stability upon which continual economic development could be sustained.

On the other hand, conformity, paradoxically enough, has hindered the development of culture and civilization. A fundamental meaning of being civilized is the ability to free oneself from natural determinism vis-a-vis social conformity. If a swallow instinctively builds its nest in a cave, a human being is free enough to choose between an igloo, a four-story building, a thatch-roofed hut, or a grand old mansion for his or her dwelling place.

In a like manner, if schools and colleges are to be the agents of civilization, they have to be designed as centers of alternative thinking instead of memorizing. To be more specific, the educational process should find a way to substitute imposed discipline with self-discipline, and allow an openness to all ideas and a deferment of judgment in choosing from among them, the adoption of a more playful attitude toward studying, etc. All these would facilitate the birth of creativeness.

Who actually can be called creative? From a psychological point of view, a creative person is a personality with novelty. But novelty is not just a matter of saying no to the establishment or doing and behaving differently from what is prescribed by society. What is more, the extend to which something is novel must go beyond the common range of experience or frame of reference. So comes the second criteria, adaptability.

This means that the courage to say no or to behave differently must be accompanied by an awareness and a competence to demonstrate that the aforementioned method would serve to solve the problems of many people. But the competence to solve social problems needs to be executed in an elegant, aesthetic way. And this is the third criterion. In other words, a complicated problem can be conveyed with simplicity, whereas an apparently simple matter can actually entail a complex issue.

And finally someone can be dubbed creative if he or she by his or her new method creates new conditions of human existence. In order to do this, it must transcend or transform the generally accepted experience of man by introducing new principles that defy tradition and radically change man's view of things.

One may immediately ask whether the ongoing political exuberance is a manifestation of creativity. And whether it benefits our education system. On first impression it appears to meet the first criterion insofar as it reveals a lot of drawbacks and weaknesses of the past system while giving a lot of promises of a brighter future. But does it serve to solve the problems of people? While it takes time to fulfill promises (which very often go unfulfilled), the habit of promising political and economic reform is nothing but a repetition of the habit of the past regime. As such, without going through to the next two criteria, we can say that the current political phenomenon fails to be creative and does not contribute to the enrichment of the education system.

Politics, therefore, owes two things to education. First, its present hailed condition was born under the midwifery of the academic domain. Politics has given back nothing in return. Second, the academic world has yielded to political importance. The educational domain may have fallen into conformity, but this inevitable conformist attitude was adopted to safeguard the perpetuation of institutions for civilization.

The acknowledgment by politics has been only in the form of promises. By paving the way for the emergence of a new condition for human existence, in an elegant manner (without mobilizing military power, say through a conspiracy), through a mode never thought of before (mass and organized demonstrations), with the ultimate goal being the betterment of the whole country, the educational world has proven creative.

But by spurting out promises, the political domain has proven to be a conformist with the previous government, not for the sake of sustaining a civilized nation but out of an inability to be creative.

The writer is a social sciences lecturer at Widya Mandira Catholic University, in Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara.