I feel like I’m having a Modern Jackass moment but I shall
plow ahead anyway and placate myself by periodically reminding the reader that
I have very little experience with what I’m talking about as of yet.
At the same time that I am beginning my education as a
teacher, I’m reading Malala Yousafzai’s co-written autobiography and articles
such as the one I c + p’ed below that the Peace Corps provided us on flash drive
before we scattered to different corners of Java. Having only been at site for
a month and a half – and during Ramadan - I haven’t had much experience in the
classroom but I can comment on the material I have read and am reading
currently, stuff I’ve heard from other volunteers who’ve already been at site
or completed their service and a few preliminary observations at my school in
this short period of time.
We were told during our three months’ training in East Java
that we might find ourselves in schools where education isn’t a high priority,
or at least we would witness schools like that while here.
Recently, education has become a top priority in Indonesia,
which is part of why Peace Corps has been invited back (only to teach English).
However, what exactly constitutes an education is the question we must ask
ourselves. The students that this women observed in her article, published in
2009, were attending school for a purpose, but not their own. It’s definitely
easy to walk into a few classrooms and see how highly recitation and repetition
are valued in all aspects of life and just see blind deference to authority but
I don’t think I’m qualified to make that judgment yet.
Another addendum to my experience is that I am teaching at a
madrasa high school, which is like a private school run by the Ministry of
Religious Affairs. My host parents, too, run an elementary school next to my
house, so it is not under MoRA’s control, but as far as I have observed, it
emphasizes education in the Quran even more so than my high school.
So I can’t say much about how my school is run – just that
it seems from a very brief glance to be an efficiently-run school with a
tight-knit community of teachers who meet regularly to discuss students’
progress and teaching methods in various classes, put in long hours and some
teachers even put work time at school ahead of engagements with their family,
which strikes me as very different, considering how highly family is valued
here. In the few teacher-student interactions I’ve seen, they don’t speak down
to the students, the students even joke around with the teachers some and no
corporal punishment is used. My initial reaction is that I’ve been placed at a
model school for child-centered learning. Although I feel like a jerk for
expecting the situation to be so different I guess the Peace Corps had to
prepare us for situations like those in the article.
My PCV neighbors (a married couple) say that they’re very
interested to hear how things go at my school because they have experienced
many of the struggles they were told to expect, particularly with counter-parts
refusing to work with them and schools that don’t provide a lot of logistical
support – to the point where one of them is switching counter-parts in her
remaining year left. They said that it may very well be that my school is a
higher quality school because it’s in the city and can be more competitive and
attract better teachers. The students also pay tuition.
Speaking of education, I’ve realized a few things while
reading Malala’s book: how important it is to be learning about Islam from a
non-American perspective, right now especially, and what it means to be American (in Indonesia). My
host uncle sat down with me while I was reading it and struck up a conversation
about Malala, who he said many Indonesians are aware of. He said he thought she
was very brave and mentioned some famous women from Indonesia who were also his
role models, including Kartini (from Blitar, where I did my site visit actually
over Kartini Day on April 21st), Dewisartika (Sundanese woman),
and Chutnyakdien (from Ace – Northern Sumatra). He also threw in that mother’s day
(hari ibu) here is celebrated on December 22nd. This doesn’t
surprise me too much that my uncle is a lot more progressive about women’s
education, just going off of little things, like the fact that he doesn’t wait
for my host mom or sisters to fix him a plate of food at night, as even my
younger host brother Zia does (although not my youngest brother Fariq), he
invites me to join the group of men outside when they’re sitting around talking
and he has a very jovial attitude which doesn’t leave a lot of room for overt sexist
attitudes.
On the second point, I’ve accumulated several thoughts over
the past few months after seeing peoples' reactions to meeting an American
foreigner. As much as I consider myself to be very blasé about patriotism, I
thought last night that you can only know what it really means to be an American
once you’ve lived abroad. Whether you’re into that kind of divisive nationalistic
thinking or not, your home country becomes a huge part of your identity when
you introduce yourself to people here. I think being an American in Indonesia
means the following things, among others:
-
You are met with immediate approval, mainly
because of Obama
-
You should remember that you from a country of privileges such as
that your country has a well-known history and is seen as the center of the
English-speaking countries; therefore you are never ignored, you are always an
object of curiosity
-
Your purpose abroad must sometimes be flexible
to the desires of your hosts or those you are with if you wish to integrate and
learn in any capacity, meaning that you most definitely don’t know what your
strongest need is at any point in your travels but it is certainly not to stay
isolated when there is a chance to meet new people and have new experiences,
however inconvenient they may sound to your personal needs of the moment.
And being a white American is, of course, a whole other blog
post, considering that the beauty standard here is based on how white your skin
is and how tall you are and how light your hair and eyes are. Something that
has been amply observed by black PCVs in my group who I've talked with about this is that they are referred to
as African instead of bule (a blanket term for most non-Indonesians, except
Asians and Africans.) When I’ve brought this up to people in my neighborhood
they say that it doesn’t matter whether they’re from Africa or not, it’s still
how they group anyone with black skin who’s not Indonesian.
I know I digressed a bit but anyway, here is the text of the critical article the Peace Corps gave us about Education in Indonesia according to one
anthropologist who studied it:
First, to break up the monotonous wall of text, here's me with the Tajemalela group that I joined, at a demonstration for the new students last Saturday
Me trying to look cool in front of my new students. The black doesn't mean extreme novice or anything, it's just the extra (XL) uniform they had on hand.
Here's my former kitten using the toilet as I trained her to do. It only happened twice.
Reconsidering Education in Indonesia: the impossibility of
child-centred pedagogy.
By Fish S.
For three decades, the World Bank has funded Indonesian
government efforts to provide universal primary education. By the mid-1980s,
this goal had been achieved in terms of quantity but improving the ‘quality’ of
primary education continues to prove highly problematic. What constitutes
‘quality’ ? What is so difficult to achieve and why? After studying three major
innovations aimed at raising the quality of education, Schaef- fer concluded:
‘This is where the problems occurred - in the attempt to change once and for
all the nature of teaching and learning, to one more child-centred, more
individualised, and more consciously interactive (between child and module,
child and child, child and teacher, and child and environment)’ (1990: 104). If
the didacticism of schooling has shown such remarkable resilience, this
suggests a case for radically reviewing what schooling is and what it does.
Rather than engage in such a review, those involved in education projects have
only ever explained the resilience of so-called rote learning by pathologizing
the teach- ers whom they understand to perpetuate it. More specifically, it is
frequently the ‘heavy hand of culture,’ under whose dictates these teachers
purportedly function, which is held to blame. Similarly, anthropological work
to-date has produced only a simulated engagement with schooling in Indonesia.
The few people who claim to have carried out classroom ethnography (e.g.
Shiraishi 1992, 1997, Siegel 1986) have not spoken to teachers, let alone
pupils, choosing instead to sit at the back of the classroom and hone their
mind- reading skills. The ways Indonesians talk about and explain the schooling
practices in which they are engaged as teachers, parents or pupils have been
ignored in favour of the anthropologists’ own (over) interpretations.
Key words: Education, Indonesia, pedagogy
Vol. 24 - n.1 (7-14) - 2009INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF
ANTHROPOLOGY
In this paper, I
provide a critical analysis of how schooling is understood by both parents and kids’
themselves, in the neighbourhood in West Java where I carried out my doctoral
research. Rather than reifying what schooling is, or should be, I deal with the
occasions when schooling impinged on parents and kids and the ways they used
schooling. First, I deal with the commentary on school produced out of school.
Secondly, drawing from my experience of going to school, I deal with what
actually went on in school and how the kids and Mrs. Teacher engaged with this.
In the conclusion I will clarify how the absolute presuppositions of parents
and kids alike are incommensurable with those of child-centered pedagogy, and
reflect on the implications of this for educational improvement projects and,
importantly, for kids.
The importance of not going to school When I first began
investigating how parents and kids in the neighbourhood understood schooling, I
was stumped. Nobody seemed to have very much to say. I neither heard parents
reflect critically on what their kids learnt at school or how it was taught,
nor assess different teachers’ abilities. I never heard parents talk about the
positive consequences that going to school would have for their kids’ futures,
for the kind of work they could aspire to. Like their parents, the kids spoke
very little about school. They never commented on what a good day they had just
had, or whether a particular lesson had been fun or boring. Furthermore, they
successfully frustrated my attempts to provoke comment about either the
routines or the content of school. When I suggested Semi (girl, age 10) write a
story entitled ‘Cerita tentang pengalaman sekolah’ (literally: A story about
the experience of school), this is what she wrote:
Cerita tentang pengalaman sekolah Kalau disekolah itu lebih
baik belajar. Kalau diajar oleh guru yang jahat saya tidak mau. Kalau saya
diajar oleh guru yang jahat itu lebih baik diajar oleh ibu guru yang baik.
Kalau sudah pulang sekolah saya main ke rumah Ka Sela. Sudah dulu ya Ka Sela
Salam manis dari Semi. SEMI Monday 7th September 1998
A story about school In school it is better that you
study/learn. If you are taught by a horrible teacher, I do not want that. If I
was taught by a horrible teacher, it would be better to be taught by a nice
teacher. When I go home from school, I go and play at Ka Sela’s. That’s all for
now, ok, Ka Sela. Love from Semi SEMI Monday 7th September 1998
8
9REcoNSIdERINg EducaTIoN IN INdoNESIa
It is not, however,
that parents and kids are blasé about schooling. Most of the kids’ fathers are
‘buruh kecil’ (literally, ‘small labourers’), doing manual labour on construction
sites and in the market, or working as pedicab drivers or wandering food
sellers. Many mothers work as ‘home helps’ in the housing complex close by.
Nevertheless, and despite the considerable financial strain involved, all made
strenuous efforts to ensure their kids were not forced to drop out of school.
This was the time of the financial crisis, yet the rising tide of primary
school drop-outs reported elsewhere in the country was not evident in this
neighbourhood. Indeed, parents considered it important that their kids achieve
high grades in their final primary school exams in order for them to be
admitted to the cheaper, but more competitive, state secondary schools. Kids
too were extremely diligent (rajin) about going to school and active in policing
any potential skivers. one morning when Bobi (boy, age 11) arrived at my house
not wearing school uniform, for example, Semi pounced on him: ‘You didn’t go to
school did you?! ‘Skiver! Skiver!’ Timidly he explained that his Mother had
gone out without waking him, so he had only got up at 8 o’clock. He refuted my
suggestion that he must have gone to bed late but Semi was having none of his
excuses. ‘ah, you’re lying!’ she asserted. Approaching the time his classmates
would arrive, he said ‘Kaka, I’m going to go home- I’m scared!’. Scared, it
transpired, of meeting his classmates. In the event, he did not leave but his
classmates’ reactions proved his original inclination right. Like Semi, they
were highly unimpressed by his skiving and no excuse he gave was good enough. Although
neither parents nor kids were engaged in the kind of critical reflection on
schooling that I was looking for, it was not, of course, that nothing was going
on. In the same way that the kids were quick to comment on Bobi’s skiving, so
parents and kids were quick to comment upon another boy’s having had to drop
out of school. Parents presumed that Jajang (boy, age 11) was happy not to go
to school because as a result he was free to ‘ameung wei’ (Sundanese. play
non-stop). While the disadvantages of not going to school (future employment,
well-being, etc) called forth no comments, Jajang’s dropping out was
nonetheless deemed problematic. What was at issue for adults was parental, or
more specifically a father’s responsibility. As one Mother put it: ‘His Fa-
ther’s like that, and always has been- when he’s fed up, he just leaves and
then doesn’t come home again for ages’. Jajang’s Father’s actions, she
continued, had consequences. Ashamed at not been able to pay his school fees,
Jajang’s parents had forced him to drop out. Furthermore, in order to feed her
family, Jajang’s Mother had no option but to rely on Jajang, her eldest child,
to look after her two younger ones (7 and 4 years old) while she worked as a
live-in house help. For the other kids likewise, the issue was not what Jajang
was missing by not going to school but his replacement obligations, which they
deemed inappropriate considering his age. Semi, for example, once said of him
‘Kak, he’s still small but he already has to take care of his younger sister
and brother. Poor him Kak - his mum rarely comes home, so it’s Jajang who takes
care of his little sister and brother. His dad works far away too’. In the
light of the above, it would appear that parents and kids do not presuppose
going to school to be good in the way one might expect them to. As I state
earlier, no-one ever talked about the ways or reasons school was good for kids,
or the ways not going to school was bad for them. Instead, the absolute
presupposition about schooling was altogether different: not going to school is
not good.
Empty lessons, un-listened to songs. If, out of school, no
one talks about school in positive terms and, instead, what is important is not
to not go to school, what does actually go on in school? What practices does
schooling consist of? What is it that the kids are learning and how? Do they
con- sider the content of lessons significant when they are in school? If it is
fundamental not to not go to school, what do the kids understand as the purpose
of their being there, when they are there? From my experience of joining the
kids of Class Five, I can best describe schooling as an ebb and flow of riotous
peace. As a new girl, I was surprised by the daily occurrence of public
disorder that was schooling; I was uncomfortable with the uncontrolled revelry
and noisy behaviour that the kids clearly enjoyed. Yet, this riotousness was
peaceful be- cause Mrs. Teacher was not in conflict with the kids. She did not
aim to gain total control over her class; she was not trying to get their full
attention. It was not, however, that Mrs. Teacher had no control. The process
of every les- son was highly routinized and the kids were au fait with when and
in what way it was necessary for them to participate. A lesson would begin with
Mrs. Teacher (or one of the pupils) copying the title, introduction and example
exercise questions from the textbook onto the blackboard. The kids entertained
themselves until this was complete, at which point the pantomime-like
participation would begin. Mrs. Teacher would read aloud through what was
written on the board. The kids would join in, en masse, on queue, with their
pre-prepared responses. If she gave them the first syllable of a word, they
would give her back the rest. If she gave them a question, they would give it
her back in the affirmative: ‘Ngerti?’ (got it?). ‘Ngerti!’ (got it!). The kids
never spoke individually, on their own initiative; they never asked questions,
never said they did not understand. The riotousness of the peace ebbed. Then it
flowed, as Mrs. Teachers went out to the staff room, supposedly leaving the
kids to get on with the exercise associated with the lesson at hand. As one of
the girls summarized on one occasion: ‘It’s like this every day, isn’t it Ka!
If Mrs. Teacher isn’t here, the boys start drumming on the desks and singing,
throwing books around, and thumping the cupboard at the back’. In order to highlight
how irrelevant the content of any lesson was in comparison to the relevance of
performing the routines, let me take an extreme example. Mrs. Teacher explained
that each pupil would have to come up to the front and sing a song, for which
she would give each a mark. Indeed, one by one, the kids all did so. Considering
this was a lesson in ‘Keterampilan dan Penjasahan’ (Skills and
commendable/Meritorious Service), however, the exercise seemed to miss the
point. The kids all sang so quietly, that their songs were impossible to hear.
This did not matter, however, because I gradually realized that no one was
listening. Instead, the other kids were busy chatting amongst themselves. Even
Mrs. Teacher at her desk, arm’s length from each kid as s/he per- formed, made
no effort to look attentive. She was busy marking exercise books. Yet, none of
the kids found this occasion out of order in any way, let alone distressing. In
my bafflement, I asked one of the girls why we were doing this. She explained
simply, ‘if you don’t want to, you’ll be given zero, be marked absent’. To be
given zero is equivalent to being absent; if you are not going to perform in
school as is expected of you, you may as well not be there. Indeed, all the
kids did sing, and all received the same mark - the mark that they had been
there and performed. The individuality of their performances, that is the
quality of each of their singing, was irrelevant. So, rather than the lesson
being pointless, it was I who had totally missed the point. The kids and Mrs.
Teacher were perfectly clear as to the purpose of the exercise, which had been
success- fully achieved by and through the kids’ performances. Indeed, in
schooling, achievement and performance are intrinsically linked. Ac- cording to
the kids, the optimum outcome of schooling is to ‘dapat prestasi,’ to get
prestasi. The best translation of prestasi might be ‘per-chievement’ because
achievement is constituted as performance, as doing what is prescribed of you.
‘Per-chievement’ is also presumed as foundational to being pintar or clever.
Another routine schooling practice involves each kid going to the front in turn
to write the answer to one of the exercise questions on the board. On one
particular occasion deti (girl, age 11) turned round and asked me
encouragingly, ‘Ka, are you going to go to the front?’. ‘Do you want to?’ I
asked her in return. ‘Yes!’, she replied, adamant and enthusiastic about the
prospect, ‘Jadi pintar!’ (So that I’m clever!). The kids never seemed
distressed if they got the answer wrong. What was important to them was to go
to the front and write an answer on the board. ‘To be clever’ (‘Jadi pintar’)
is therefore more aptly translated as ‘to be seen to be clever,’ that is, to be
seen to be performing as prescribed. Mrs. Teacher too understood as crucial
that the kids be seen to be performing as prescribed. As the marks she gave the
kids for singing bore no relation to the quality of their performance, so the
grades she gave them for their homework were not considered indicative of a
pupil’s ability. Diligent parents do their children’s homework for them, and
these children get good marks. Consequently, they ‘dapat prestasi’ (get
per-chieve- ment) because they have done what was required of them. For Mrs.
Teacher what was problematic was ‘poor’ kids who did not get their homework
done because their parents were away working. In conclusion, then, the
presupposition that it is important not to not go to school is perfectly
compatible with how schooling is constituted in school. The routinized practices
that make up schooling and the kids’ and Mrs. Teacher’s understanding of these
same practices throw light on why it is fundamental to not not go to school.
Made up of empty lessons and un-listened to songs, I have shown the content of
school lessons to be irrelevant. I have argued instead that the purpose of
schooling is to participate in the routines, to be seen to perform as
prescribed. This being the case, there is clearly no possibility of doing
schooling from a distance. There is no catching up on public performances; if
you miss an occasion, it is gone. Consequently, it is important not to not go
to school.
Conclusion: the incommensurability of child-centred pedagogy
Premised on the science of developmental psychology, child-centred pedagogy is
pur- portedly learning as is natural to ‘the child’. Children learn by doing,
by actively exploring, by play. Bundles of innate cognitive ability, all that
is required is the right environment for their Nature to unfold. This
responsibility falls primarily to teachers. Indeed child-centred pedagogy has
become so taken for granted, that it is difficult to see these statements as
problematic; it is difficult to think outside them (cf. Walkerdine 1984, 1988).
What I am arguing, however, is that the success of child-centred pedagogy has
created new problems, like the one with which I opened this paper: the
continued effort and failure to improve the quality of primary education in
Indonesia, to make it more child-centred. The more successfully education has
been articulated as child-centred, the more other pos- sible understandings
have been disarticulated. With rival understandings of education dis- located
in this way, so-called rote-learning can only be understood as not real
understand- ing. The only way to explain its persistence is by pathologizing
teachers who cultivate this infertile environment. On the other hand, if
child-centred pedagogy was not so endlessly and exclusively reiterated, then
what is going on in Indonesian primary schools might have been taken seriously.
What is going on might have been investigated, as opposed to repeated
investigations into what is not. Through this paper, I have highlighted local,
counter-articulations of education. Far from ignorant, as they are treated by
way of a child-centred articulation, my analysis shows Mrs. Teacher, and
crucially the kids and their parents too, all know exactly what they are do-
ing by way of schooling. They are perfectly clear as to the purpose of
education. Furthermore, I have shown that what is going on is not primarily the
rote learning of facts but something altogether different. The often and
inappropriately called hidden-curriculum consists of doing repetitious routines,
of being seen to do what is required. The rote-learning of facts takes place as
well, in order for the kids to pass their multiple choice examinations but in
no way did Mrs. Teacher, the kids or their parents rank it more highly than
‘per-chievement’. Moreover, this counter-articulation of education does not
presuppose kids to be naturally (cognitively) developing beings, nor does it
consider classrooms fertile environments. The absolute presuppositions are
incommensurable with those of child-centred pedagogy. Yet, a child-centred
articulation of education, which treats teachers as ignorant, kids as subject
only to their own nature and ignores parents, cannot engage with these
counter-articulations of education productively. In place of dialogue, all
parties involved seem destined to keep talking past each other. In light of my
analysis, therefore, the on-going efforts to make primary education in
Indonesia more child-centred emerge as rudely arrogant, often farcical and
potentially criminal considering the mounting national debt involved. Sadly,
however, this argument has been made before and on a much larger scale. Take
the following criticism of the dominant research paradigm in the World Bank and
uSaId, for example: ‘Anecdotes abound regarding the chalk-and-talk pedagogical
method of many Third World teachers. But we have few concrete descriptions of
how teachers interact with pupils, how student exercises are structured and
evaluated, and what forms of knowledge are communicated …
These beliefs and practices define how the teacher can
legitimately act in the class- room … Yet we have very little evidence on how
these deep social rules interact with the use of instructional materials to
shape pupil achievement’ ( Fuller & Heyneman 1988, in King 1991: 212-3). As
I bring this paper to an end, there is one more effect of the articulation of
child- centred education to which I want to draw attention. Many Indonesian
commentators and academics have presumed the per-chievement based practices of
schooling to be the re- sult of ex-president Soeharto’s New order government’s
intention to ensure that ‘children … internalize their invisibility as the
insignificant collectivity’ (Shiraishi 1997: 164). The practices of empty
lessons and unlistened to songs are reminiscent of military government. Kids
drilled in the importance of being accounted for and taught not to abscond;
kids drilled to do what is required by the regime, taught that if they do they
will be left in peace. Kids taught, that is, to be subjects and definitely not
to be citizens, treated as subject to the power of others and not as agents in
their own right and given no criteria with which to object. Though highly
opinionated about numerous other practices, the kids were not equipped with a
critical vocabulary with which to talk about schooling. Yet, the situation is
arguably more complex than state brainwashing, the coincidence rather of
different intentions, of different articulations. As we have seen, for example,
parents did not force their kids to go to school out of any fear of the state.
Rather, not to not send you kid to school they considered good and responsible
parenting. The effect, nevertheless, is terrifying. On the one hand, the kids
do not have any access to prior critical statements about schooling from their
parents. The powerful effect of this articulation of school was most clear to
me as it effected Jajang, the boy who had dropped out. He was unable to
articulate back effectively, concerning his predicament of not going to school
because there was nothing upon which he could build a counter-argument; he was
disarticulated (cf. Hobart 1999). Merely to draw attention to the fact of his
not going to school was to criticise his own parents. Therefore, he went to
great efforts to protect what he did when the other kids were at school from
public scrutiny, cultivating a secret life. On the other hand, with schooling
empty from beginning to end, kids do not have access to any critical statements
via this articulation either. They are, in this way, doubly disarticulated-
firstly by the articulation of going to school as indicative of good parenting,
and secondly, by the articulation of schooling as empty lessons and unlistened
to songs. Finally those promoting child-centred pedagogy are responsible for a
third disarticulation. In their strenuous efforts to improve the quality of
primary education, these parties have made no effort to engage in critical
dialogue with either teachers or parents and their counter-articulations.
Neither is it through a child-centred articulation, then, that kids are going
to be enabled to think. Rather than opening a dialogue and thereby providing Indonesian
kids with something to work on, these child-centred parties can be understood
as effecting a triple disarticulation. Child-centred indeed!
14 FISH References Fuller, B. & Heyneman, S. (1988).
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