Many experts have been suggesting genuine solution on how to make education becomes a truly liberating effort for prosperity of our nation. But debates are still hitting up since nothing has significantly changed, as implied in Abdullah Yazid’s opinion in The Jakarta Post (Saturday, March 16, 2008) daily. As an education practitioner, I do agree with his ideas despite some different solutions. That university graduates find it quite difficult to find jobs has been so widely rampant in the country. University graduates lack of skills and creativity which is in fact, immensely needed for their working phase. No one should blame each single institution separately, but to be inevitably criticizing our overall education system from elementary to higher level that needed to be transformed. We need an exceedingly serious strategy to solve these problems.
A Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1993) explained that the true education goals would be achieved only by demonstrating a problem-posing education, coinciding against the banking system. In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation. Hence, students and teachers get accustomed to the real problems existing in society they live and proudly offer solutions through a dialectical process which is not possible on the banking system. Such kind of practice of learning process will attract related aspects in education system.
Curriculum
Of four crucial elements of education, curriculum is the very determining aspect beside teacher, student, and method. Comparing our curriculum with the one used worldwide might open our eyes and paradigms. At a glance, let us look at two prominent curriculums with their typical strengths. Firstly, the University of Cambridge International Examinations (CIE) successfully spreads away the variety of programs as the world’s largest provider of international qualifications for 5-18 years old, with no exception here in Indonesia. Many schools adopt this curriculum. Even more, some combine with our national curriculum so their students can sit for UAN test as well.
Schools using the curriculum give emphasis on the flexibility. From primary to secondary levels there are always elective subjects for students to choose based on their interests and to prevent them from imposing a huge number of theory which is not necessarily useful for their future study. Secondly, the IB curriculum which is program for students aged 3 to 19 help develop the intellectual, personal, emotional and social skills in facing a rapidly globalizing world. I have been impressed by its primary curricula arranged to cope with what a student is going to deal with in their future, a strategy we need amid disorientation of our primary education. In sum of inquires, students study transdisciplinary themes of global significance that provide the framework for exploration such as: who we are, how we express ourselves, how we organize ourselves, sharing the planet and so on. Two points to be noticed are the flexibility and a constant transdiciplinary inquiry.
Such a curriculum allows teachers to creatively arrange a lively active learning environment with the students in the classroom, assisting them to identify their strengths and abilities to change their social conditions and problems. In contrary, we are so controlled by our content of curriculum, guiding us to walk an ended process of learning by taking national examination. I like giving my students with some challenging issues to be debated and discussed, and later on come with their own alternative solution. Last December for example, I was arranging a cooperative learning in the class discussing about Millenium Development Goals with its 8 holy goals. To do so, I decided to skip a few topics or with less comprehension. Later on last February a regulation came out from the government stipulating that subjects examined on UAN will be added including Sociology, the subject I teach. Now, I have to push myself with a very tight deadline of the next final national examination, just for the student to remember and understand the content to answer the questions. Is it possible for us to substantially restrict our curriculum?
Changing the curriculum is a voluntary responsibility for the teachers so far. How to elaborate the main guidelines called standard of competence and basic competence based on students need and social system surrounding them. A skill, teachers should be familiar with beside other essential qualities. A teacher should be a facilitator, popular educator encouraging people to critically articulate social issues of concern and to suggest ways of resolving conflict in the real life. Popular education is a tool, a helpful beginning which brings people and ideas together, people with a desire to accept responsibility for social change, instead of living under the domination of powerful elites. It means that a problem-posing education hopefully could eradicate our severe corruption and other immoral deeds to our people and nation as we prepare the vibrant, critical, and broadminded leaders.
After all, we teach the students many subjects at school almost every day, yet we do not teach them how to learn. There is a missing link when we want them to be successful but abandon them in how to do it. I suggest that from very low level of education, students should be taught a subject of Learning skills, or a kind of Critical Thinking so that they become independent and pure learners throughout their lives.
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