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Student brawls:
A tale behind ‘school for violence’
Khairil Azhar ; A Researcher
at the Paramadina Foundation
and Ciputat
School for Democratic Islam
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JAKARTA
POST, 01 Oktober 2012
If someday, you
visit a “famous” state school that your child might go to, please stay a little
longer to have a look. If possible, please observe the teaching-learning
processes inside or outside the classrooms. You can stay at the school canteen
or a food stall nearby, or go into the restroom and try to comprehend what
might happen there.
It is not altogether shocking to see a teacher daydreaming in his chair, while some students have a hullabaloo and others try to teach themselves.
“If you want to pass the National Exams,” a teacher usually states, “please study hard [by yourself].” Implicitly or often explicitly, he wants to say that, “being at a famous school is more for the sake of social status rather than for enjoying the best practices of education.”
“Just throw the books into the class,” say some other teachers, “and the students will learn by themselves.” Many teachers actually embrace this belief.
In a relatively comprehensive study titled “The Effect of School Type on Academic Achievement: Evidence from Indonesia”, the World Bank found in 2005 that the average higher academic achievement of students of the state schools was more attributable to the better input academically and better socio-economic backgrounds of most of the students.
So, how about the teaching-learning processes? How are the students educated for the development of their psychomotor and affective domains? How mature can our children mentally be if they are educated in the atmosphere of cognitive orientation and permissiveness of the teachers? What excellent values can we hope that our children might have and be trained for?
If we go further with our “quick” observation, we might be surprised if we find that the restrooms of the schools of our children are not better than the ones we find at a bus or gas station!
At the school’s security post, canteen or the food stalls, we might meet teachers smoking, speaking rudely, teasing female students and so on.
And there are gimmicky labels. The SBI label recognizes school with international standards, RSBI signifies schools prepared for international standards, while “Sekolah Negeri Favorit” means favorite state school and so on. Yet, do the schools really have the qualities they boast?
Concerning the learning processes, private schools such as the ones run by missionary foundations often offer much better educations despite the fact that many of them are actually managed on small or even shoe-string budgets. Some schools even achieve better academic standards than the public schools. The above World Bank study and other previous research confirm this fact.
So, with some of the above facts, the repeated student brawls and acts of violence are more easily understood. The teaching-learning processes do not facilitate students’ sufficient or effective learning required to foster the practice of civilized living values in their daily lives.
The schools here, for instance, tend to not teach the students how to respect others but conversely educate them on how to bully their juniors or others.
The other problem is the parents. Many of them are well-educated and have good economic backgrounds. However, do they not know that many of the schools’ factually have a recurrent history of violence?
In fact, if the middle-class parents are a bit concerned, they just have to Google, “tawuran” (brawl), “sekolah” (school), or “Jakarta”. Dozens of schools with long histories of violence will appear. Many of them are favorite state schools, mostly junior and senior high schools and colleges.
Returning to our discussion about teachers, one of them might say, “Thank God, I am now a state employee. I also can make money through giving private classes. The hard time [as a voluntary teacher] is over.”
A state-employed teacher can be at school at 6:30 a.m., precisely at the beginning of classes and be at home again or somewhere else at 10 or 11 a.m. on the same morning. He will return to school again when he has to take attendance in the early afternoon.
Who then teach his classes? Amateur teachers, university students getting on-the-job training or other teachers who have to handle two, three or even four classes at the same time? Most importantly, everybody applies the “tahu sama tahu” principle that something can be done as long as there is an agreement in terms of compensation and by turns.
With this poor performance, how are the students taught and disciplined?
One of the choices is to build what then might be the agents of violence. At every school, for instance, we can find organizations and activities with semi-militaristic concepts and patterns such as MOS (student initiation camp), Paskibra (assembly for flag wavers), etcetera. We can also find voluntary groups or student gangs that are militant in forming their cadres.
This practice then disseminates oppression by with patterns of senior student dominance over their juniors, punishment-based schooling and the permissive, lazy mindsets of the teachers. And all of these concepts, practices and patterns are bequeathed concurrently.
If it is not an “impossible” task to achieve and implement effective government policy, our hope for betterment surely is on the shoulders of the committed teachers who are available. But, the question remains whether will they become the main players amid the waves of permissiveness and selfishness. ●
It is not altogether shocking to see a teacher daydreaming in his chair, while some students have a hullabaloo and others try to teach themselves.
“If you want to pass the National Exams,” a teacher usually states, “please study hard [by yourself].” Implicitly or often explicitly, he wants to say that, “being at a famous school is more for the sake of social status rather than for enjoying the best practices of education.”
“Just throw the books into the class,” say some other teachers, “and the students will learn by themselves.” Many teachers actually embrace this belief.
In a relatively comprehensive study titled “The Effect of School Type on Academic Achievement: Evidence from Indonesia”, the World Bank found in 2005 that the average higher academic achievement of students of the state schools was more attributable to the better input academically and better socio-economic backgrounds of most of the students.
So, how about the teaching-learning processes? How are the students educated for the development of their psychomotor and affective domains? How mature can our children mentally be if they are educated in the atmosphere of cognitive orientation and permissiveness of the teachers? What excellent values can we hope that our children might have and be trained for?
If we go further with our “quick” observation, we might be surprised if we find that the restrooms of the schools of our children are not better than the ones we find at a bus or gas station!
At the school’s security post, canteen or the food stalls, we might meet teachers smoking, speaking rudely, teasing female students and so on.
And there are gimmicky labels. The SBI label recognizes school with international standards, RSBI signifies schools prepared for international standards, while “Sekolah Negeri Favorit” means favorite state school and so on. Yet, do the schools really have the qualities they boast?
Concerning the learning processes, private schools such as the ones run by missionary foundations often offer much better educations despite the fact that many of them are actually managed on small or even shoe-string budgets. Some schools even achieve better academic standards than the public schools. The above World Bank study and other previous research confirm this fact.
So, with some of the above facts, the repeated student brawls and acts of violence are more easily understood. The teaching-learning processes do not facilitate students’ sufficient or effective learning required to foster the practice of civilized living values in their daily lives.
The schools here, for instance, tend to not teach the students how to respect others but conversely educate them on how to bully their juniors or others.
The other problem is the parents. Many of them are well-educated and have good economic backgrounds. However, do they not know that many of the schools’ factually have a recurrent history of violence?
In fact, if the middle-class parents are a bit concerned, they just have to Google, “tawuran” (brawl), “sekolah” (school), or “Jakarta”. Dozens of schools with long histories of violence will appear. Many of them are favorite state schools, mostly junior and senior high schools and colleges.
Returning to our discussion about teachers, one of them might say, “Thank God, I am now a state employee. I also can make money through giving private classes. The hard time [as a voluntary teacher] is over.”
A state-employed teacher can be at school at 6:30 a.m., precisely at the beginning of classes and be at home again or somewhere else at 10 or 11 a.m. on the same morning. He will return to school again when he has to take attendance in the early afternoon.
Who then teach his classes? Amateur teachers, university students getting on-the-job training or other teachers who have to handle two, three or even four classes at the same time? Most importantly, everybody applies the “tahu sama tahu” principle that something can be done as long as there is an agreement in terms of compensation and by turns.
With this poor performance, how are the students taught and disciplined?
One of the choices is to build what then might be the agents of violence. At every school, for instance, we can find organizations and activities with semi-militaristic concepts and patterns such as MOS (student initiation camp), Paskibra (assembly for flag wavers), etcetera. We can also find voluntary groups or student gangs that are militant in forming their cadres.
This practice then disseminates oppression by with patterns of senior student dominance over their juniors, punishment-based schooling and the permissive, lazy mindsets of the teachers. And all of these concepts, practices and patterns are bequeathed concurrently.
If it is not an “impossible” task to achieve and implement effective government policy, our hope for betterment surely is on the shoulders of the committed teachers who are available. But, the question remains whether will they become the main players amid the waves of permissiveness and selfishness. ●
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