In Indonesia, Liberal Studies Are Unfurtunately Neglected

In Indonesia, Liberal Studies Are Unfurtunately Neglected

Singapore recently launched a breakthrough in higher education. The Straits Times (July 7) reported the opening of the Liberal Arts College as part of the National University of Singapore (NUS), claiming to be the first college of its kind in the country.

 At the ground-breaking ceremony, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong envisioned that the graduates of Yale-NUS College would develop the ability to think critically and to understand world complexities. They are also expected to develop skills of communication and the arts of leadership.

 The college will be completed in 2015 and the first batch of 150 students will start their studies in August 2013. By 2015, this college will house 1,000 students and 100 faculty members. The students will comprise well-selected students from Asia, Europe and America. The college will combine the intellectual traditions of Yale, Oxford and Cambridge.

 As with other colleges of liberal arts, the Yale-NUS College is distinctive in many respects. During the first two years of the baccalaureate program, students will study general education courses combining Western and Eastern perspectives. Upon completion of those, they will choose one of 14 majors offered, such as anthropology, urban studies, etc.

 Second, the curriculum will be designed to suit the social and cultural context of Singapore in particular and Asia in general. Combining US and European traditions of liberal arts molded in tandem with the global power of Asia, the college will develop an innovative learning-teaching culture. The students will also benefit from modern facilities including 30 sky gardens so as to facilitate maximum learning and teaching.

 Third, the college will have three residential colleges where the students will live in nested communities, typical of the long-established traditions of Yale, Oxford and Cambridge. In this way, the students will learn from each other as much as from the professors. Twenty percent of the faculty, including the college president Pericles Lewis, will also stay in the college.

 Fourth, the college will require the students to study the so-called great books or kitab-kitab adiluhung, such as The Iliad by Homer and the Hindu epic, Bhagavad Gita. The college graduates will be a new generation, namely Asians who are knowledgeable about European culture and Europeans who are knowledgeable about Asian culture. In short, the college will be a place for dialogue between great civilizations.

 Fifth, the college will emphasize liberal arts or the humanities, rather than vocational skills. It is purposely designed to provide students with two types of knowledge of equal importance: specialization and general education.

 Mindful of the aforementioned criteria, a number of pedagogical values are worth elaborating. Striking the balance between the two opposing Eastern-Western ideologies is a sensible strategy. This should be materialized in the curriculum. At home, many academics tend to readily accept Western concepts as valuable and worth adopting, without necessarily realizing that the corresponding concepts exist in local cultures.

 To live in a dormitory or residential college is educative in many aspects. It provides students with the maximum opportunity of learning. Both lecturers and students live a happy life in a nested community, supervised by mentors, faculty members and management staff.

 Besides that, the college will promote a peer effect; that is, informal and mutual learning and teaching, an educational experience almost taken for granted by many. Extra-curricular activities, such as sports, music, vocal groups, publications and informal coffee talks late into the night, will provide lessons provided by excellent professors. The nested community represents the community at large.

 Sharing a room with somebody with a different religion, language and culture will promote cross-cultural appreciation and tolerance to understand human beings as whole people. Students are conditioned to be open-minded, non-sectarian and ready to accept differences. Such a residential life is typical of undergraduate programs in the US, one that barely exists in Indonesia.

 As critics have pointed out, our universities have failed to produce (prospective) leaders, politicians and bureaucrats with multicultural intelligence. That is, the predisposition to be tolerant toward differences. They should demonstrate qualities such as open-mindedness, non-sectarian attitudes and an ability to communicate with people from multicultural backgrounds. Without such qualities, they will definitely fail to manage the nation, and as a consequence, the country is destined to become a failed state.

 Apparently, our universities have failed to inculcate the mission of liberal arts on the students. In the US, students are required to read the “great books” passed on from generation to generation. Despite an abundance of great works, our educational system has not identified the great books as must-read books for our students. This is telling evidence that our universities have failed to discover the great traditions and deeds of those who came before us.

 The existing general education courses, called MKDU (Mata Kuliah Dasar Umum), could function as liberal studies in the US, provided they are redesigned properly. Customarily, the courses comprise Indonesian language, English, religion, sports, citizenship, arts appreciation and community service. However, these courses are perceived as the least important. From the outset, the students are readily overwhelmed with specialization courses, and therefore view the MKDU courses as being easy.

 Ostensibly within the existing system, students develop their specializations too early, receiving meaningless general studies. Noticeably, those who graduate from the system become the ruling politicians and bureaucrats who lack an understanding of their own culture. Moreover, they lack competence to communicate with their own constituents.

 Long before the colonial powers came to Indonesia and up to the present day, there have been at the grassroots level traditional Islamic boarding schools or pesantren. Students as well as teachers live in the compound as a nested community. Junior students learn from senior ones as mentors. The teachers set a good example of living a modest life and are always available for consultation on academic and non-academic matters.

 This residential college system has been a distinctive feature of the world-class universities, such as Oxford, Cambridge and Yale. Singapore is now joining them to catch up. Our educational policy makers are just blind to the fact that this system is actually deep-rooted in our own soil.

 Despite huge allocations of funding to the Education and Culture Ministry, building residential colleges is perceived as less important than, say, building gymnasiums and laboratories. Actually, residential colleges are a good place for thoughtful students to develop as future leaders in the community. Living with others with different religious, cultural and language backgrounds is an invaluable learning experience that would be useful for managing this multicultural nation.

A Chaedar Alwasilah

A Professor at the Indonesian Education University (UPI), Bandung, A Member of The Board of Higher Education

JAKARTA POST, 21 Juli 2012

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