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It is quite understandable that
parents are apprehensive over the recent revelation of alleged pornographic
content in an Indonesian elementary school textbook.
Within the book was a short story titled Anak Gembala dan Induk Serigala (The Shepherd’s Son and Mother Wolf), about a female rape victim who became pregnant and then had to struggle to support her kid.
A story such as this, according to many, belongs in the category of indecent material not proper for the consumption of elementary school students. The words pemerkosaan (rape) and pelacuran (prostitution) seemed to have ignited public outcry, as they were deemed licentious and improper to be contained in a textbook intended for school children.
The real author of the story Dedy Tri Riyadi defended in a statement, arguing that these words were neither indecent nor immoral, and they reflected a factual condition, which therefore should not have caused a tumult of public anger and disappointment. Dedy may be right in his defense.
It may sound too prejudicial to label the words pemerkosaan and pelacuran in the book as constituting pornographic content. Such is the sweeping generalization and entrapment of myopic views of the notion of moral conduct.
Moreover, it is too reductive a view to lay a claim that children’s behavior will be influenced only by what they read in a textbook from school.
We need to be aware that what students encounter in the outside/real world plays a much more significant role in shaping (either positively or negatively) their behavior, rather than what they learn during class instruction. The lessons they take up and emulate from these outside forces constitute their own cultures.
In this sense, cultures should be understood as not restricted only to superficial material worlds such as food, festivities and dress.
This is indeed a short-sighted and utterly deterministic view of culture. But, cultures here are meant as an amalgam of accumulated behaviors, shaped from what children observe in real socio-political domains of life (e.g. injustice, class, religious and gender discrimination, poverty, powerlessness and criminal acts), through life-impacting media such as television, the internet and newspapers. Construed in this sense, children’s cultures are inherently dynamic, highly complex and are always in a constant change.
Thus, even without being exposed to learning materials in class, children already bring with them their own culture, which are manifested in their daily conduct. What they learn in class may admittedly impact on their behavior and accumulate to form additional parts of their culture already shaped from outside influences.
Yet, simply assuming that their behaviors are negatively affected only by the so-called “pornographic” content in the textbook is an unreasonable bogey.
The influx of contemporary media and sophisticated communication technology has made it impossible for us to control or censure incessant flows of information, which children consume outside of school almost every day.
If the understanding of pornographic material have no semantic limits, then all disseminated information or frenzied news (by the media) related to rape, adultery, prostitution, infidelity can be subsumed under pornographic material.
Thus, children are not free from what French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic violence both in school (through learning materials such as textbooks) and outside of school (through the exposure of information by the media).
The alleged pornographic material — which happened to be found in the Bahasa Indonesia textbook — is only a small instance of this symbolic violence.
Other texts (which are not necessarily related to rape story and prostitution) in the same textbook are not guaranteed to be free from other types of symbolic violence.
No less important, children are always confronted with rich types of symbolic violence through information spread by media; among other things are a real stories of a political figures who commit adultery, a real story of violence perpetrated by a certain mass organization, and a real story of religious subjugation.
It seems clear now that we cannot ignore, let alone escape from myriad types of symbolic violence due to its ubiquity. Similarly, we are not supposed to make a fuss over the alleged pornographic material in the textbook. What parents and teachers must do now is to undo this symbolic violence by making them critically conscious of the detrimental effects of symbolic violence.
In doing so, they can weigh down what they witness every day, and more importantly make use of their critical consciousness to counter the false consciousness. ●
Within the book was a short story titled Anak Gembala dan Induk Serigala (The Shepherd’s Son and Mother Wolf), about a female rape victim who became pregnant and then had to struggle to support her kid.
A story such as this, according to many, belongs in the category of indecent material not proper for the consumption of elementary school students. The words pemerkosaan (rape) and pelacuran (prostitution) seemed to have ignited public outcry, as they were deemed licentious and improper to be contained in a textbook intended for school children.
The real author of the story Dedy Tri Riyadi defended in a statement, arguing that these words were neither indecent nor immoral, and they reflected a factual condition, which therefore should not have caused a tumult of public anger and disappointment. Dedy may be right in his defense.
It may sound too prejudicial to label the words pemerkosaan and pelacuran in the book as constituting pornographic content. Such is the sweeping generalization and entrapment of myopic views of the notion of moral conduct.
Moreover, it is too reductive a view to lay a claim that children’s behavior will be influenced only by what they read in a textbook from school.
We need to be aware that what students encounter in the outside/real world plays a much more significant role in shaping (either positively or negatively) their behavior, rather than what they learn during class instruction. The lessons they take up and emulate from these outside forces constitute their own cultures.
In this sense, cultures should be understood as not restricted only to superficial material worlds such as food, festivities and dress.
This is indeed a short-sighted and utterly deterministic view of culture. But, cultures here are meant as an amalgam of accumulated behaviors, shaped from what children observe in real socio-political domains of life (e.g. injustice, class, religious and gender discrimination, poverty, powerlessness and criminal acts), through life-impacting media such as television, the internet and newspapers. Construed in this sense, children’s cultures are inherently dynamic, highly complex and are always in a constant change.
Thus, even without being exposed to learning materials in class, children already bring with them their own culture, which are manifested in their daily conduct. What they learn in class may admittedly impact on their behavior and accumulate to form additional parts of their culture already shaped from outside influences.
Yet, simply assuming that their behaviors are negatively affected only by the so-called “pornographic” content in the textbook is an unreasonable bogey.
The influx of contemporary media and sophisticated communication technology has made it impossible for us to control or censure incessant flows of information, which children consume outside of school almost every day.
If the understanding of pornographic material have no semantic limits, then all disseminated information or frenzied news (by the media) related to rape, adultery, prostitution, infidelity can be subsumed under pornographic material.
Thus, children are not free from what French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic violence both in school (through learning materials such as textbooks) and outside of school (through the exposure of information by the media).
The alleged pornographic material — which happened to be found in the Bahasa Indonesia textbook — is only a small instance of this symbolic violence.
Other texts (which are not necessarily related to rape story and prostitution) in the same textbook are not guaranteed to be free from other types of symbolic violence.
No less important, children are always confronted with rich types of symbolic violence through information spread by media; among other things are a real stories of a political figures who commit adultery, a real story of violence perpetrated by a certain mass organization, and a real story of religious subjugation.
It seems clear now that we cannot ignore, let alone escape from myriad types of symbolic violence due to its ubiquity. Similarly, we are not supposed to make a fuss over the alleged pornographic material in the textbook. What parents and teachers must do now is to undo this symbolic violence by making them critically conscious of the detrimental effects of symbolic violence.
In doing so, they can weigh down what they witness every day, and more importantly make use of their critical consciousness to counter the false consciousness. ●
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