RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN DIFFERING IN DEED OPINION? SIGHT IN INDONESIA

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN DIFFERING IN DEED OPINION? SIGHT IN INDONESIA

Habermas Has Put religion to rest and has pronounced its theoretical and social and social-developmental death. (Religion dan rationalitas )

"For anyone interested in contemporary intellectual efforts to imagine a more peaceful and equitable world order, The Divided West is a must-read." International Studies Review"Ever since the end of the cold war, Habermas has been trying to define an alternative vision of a new world order. In this collection, he presents that vision in its most accessible and passionate form."

This paper elaborates three important things concerning with teaching religion in order to cultivate tolerance, respect, and recognition of diversity. Firstly, it shows the historical background of interreligius harmony ( kerukunan) in Indonesia under the slogan”Bhineka Tunggal ika”( unity in diversity) and its failures. Secondly, especially in cope with religious ( including ethnic and cultural ) diversities and differences. In consideration to the first thing, religious education affirms a dichotomy between “official religions” and indigenous beliefs as two different entities. In consequent, the dichotomy discriminates religious minorities and indigenous beliefs. In addition, contents of religious teaching also reflected exlusive characteristics. And last but not least, based on above description ( macro failure in the system of nation-state; and micro failure in the system of civic education and religious education), it is necessary to introduce new system of interreligious education.

Introduction

For last three decades, the harmony of inter-religious communities in Indonesia under motto Bhineka Tunggal Ika (Unity in diversity), had been maintained through the bureaucratic and structural mechanism. In order to maintain the harmony and unity, the new order government created a policy of social tolerance that claimed any actions aimed at ethnic, race, religion and inter-groups (SARA) senjtimens should be avoided.

The New Order government applied the policy repressively. State Terrorism strongly colored the policy in the era of Suharto regime, such as; spreading the state intelligence in various political structure from the headquarter up to district; creating, the equality in the position of civil and military, determining the prohibhition of spreading hatred through rubber verse (haatai artikelen) in a subversive bills; creating the permit on realigous teaching for ulemas and mubaligh; provoking every person who oppeses him in order to revolt and then destroyed forever; making stigma through labeling” PKI” (Indonesian Communist Party) for every rebel etc.

Some Indonesian and forign observer noticed that the atmosphere of the relations among religious communities in Indonesia was at the best condition at that time. Some observers also valued that Pancasila an ideology has been succeeded in playing a unifying role of nation-state.[1]

The implementation of the top-down policy has found its failure before and after the downfall the New Order regime. It was marked by increasing the scale of violence-direct and indirect, structural and cultural-riots and conflicts because of different religion, ethnic, social groups and politic happened every where in Indonesia nowadays.

All of them are the real indicators of the government’s ignorance on the right and existence of local cultures from hundreds ethnic and social groups all over the country. For more than three decades, the improvement of efficiency and productivity of the government development program had been done through various efforts to make homogeneous all sorts of cultures tures in Indonesia. The tendency of the cultural homogeneity was motivated by the need of defending and maintaining the nation stability as one of the main development capitals. The authoritarian and totalitarian government and the imbalanced competition in exploiting the economic and political resources had emerged the jealousy and large social gaps in distributing the development welfare, which later created various forms of justice was far from society’s hope. It was clear that the harmonious construction, which was been proud all the time, was more like a fragile and vulnerable spider web. The harmonious theology that has been maintained by the old regime was passive and static so that it failed in understanding the phenomena of collapse of social and religious harmony in this country.

For the same period, education in Indonesia had discussed a little about how We appreciate and respect the religious or belief diversity and variety of cultural wealth. There was a tendency of homogenization introduced systematically through the education under the national cultural protection, the hegemony of Javanese culture as a center and others as the edges and pauperization of culture by shortening the variety of cultural identity into a number of Indonesian provinces. The process of homogenization and the cultural hegemony and pauperization was taught in civic education, such as education of Pancasila and Citizenship, Education of National History and Struggle, Training of P4 (Guidance for Internalization and Externalization of Pancasila) — and even religious education.

According to GBHN (Global Lines of State’s Programs), the religions that had right to live in Indonesia are the ones that acknowledged officially by the government. They were Islam, Catholic, Christian, Buddha and Hindu. GBHN year 1993 instructed various matters, for example: one of the national development objectives in the field of religious life was to create the harmonious life of religious communities. The government together with the religious leaders had made many efforts to achieve the objectives. The efforts were to create dialogues among religious leaders, informal discussion, conference and seminar joined by religious leaders and scholars from all the available religious communities.

One of the efforts to create the harmony of religious life was to establish the forum of communication and consultation for maintaining the harmony of religious communities in which the government plays the initiator and the representatives from all “official” religions were the followers. The forum was established in 1980 and called Wadah Musyawarah Antar Umat Beragama (Inter-Religious Communities Conference Organization). The members of the forum were MUI (Council of Indonesian Ulemas), PGI (United of Indonesian Churches), KWI (Conference of Indonesian Churches), Walubi (Council of Indonesian Buddhist Followers) and Parisada Hindu Dharma. Thirteen years later the government initiated the first National Conference on Religions in Indonesia held on October 11-12, 1993 and declared the LPKUB (the Institute for Study of the Harmonious Life of Religious Communities). The Minister of Religious Affairs, Tarmizi Taher, initiated the establishment of the institute. The objective of this institute was to study and to develop religious thinking on harmonious relations among the spiritual communities from various religions, and to offer the contribution of thinking on this matter. The government also disseminated the official religions point of view on the harmonious life of communities under the supervision of the Department of Religious Affairs. The effort was under the supervision of the Improvement Program on Harmonious Life of Religious Communities, Committee of Religious Study and Development.[2]

Education Problem

To achieve the objective mentioned before, the government used any efforts, includes using the religious education as an instrument to indoctrinate the religious freedom as they wished. Religion, which accidentally had the genealogy of and relation to forbidden ideology communism, was Kong Hu Cu and because of that, it was not acknowledged as an official religion.. Without teaching the democratic values, the country and school had abridged the role of diversity and restricted the political alternatives for students and society.

Multiculturalism is generally defined as a social-intellectual movement that urges the value of diversity as its main principle and strengthens the view that all cultural groups should be treated equally and respected. Multiculturalism in Indonesia has been a significant issue and accepted its place in the contemporary life nowadays, at the same time the awareness of improving the social order and harmony of state and national life that had been destroyed by violence that were caused by many reasons and in various forms emerges, because the very latest experiences showed that diversity developed to become one had not been able to respond to time-space change.

Beside the previous reasons, there are at least other two reasons why multiculturalism has to be accommodated, generally, in a citizenship education system and, especially, in religious education. First, Bill no.22 year 1999 on District Government, and Bill no. 25 year 1999 on Financial Balances between Central Government and District Government are interrelated with decentralization power (district autonomy) that has created “little kings” who carry ethnic chauvinism that worsens the situation of ethnic and religious conflict and tension. The real democrat uses the open democracy space less than the anti-democrat elites who often manipulate the ethnic issue to weaken the demand of democracy. It seems that Indonesian people have been experiencing the result of ethnic politicization that has been exploited arbitrarily by the local elites who tend to put forward the primordial ties that the ethnicity is only understood as the ancestor’s reality. The difference of religious, ethnic and socio-cultural groups in its size and political significance that has increased more and more in the last few years has emerged the demand that the policy and social programs should be responsive to the need and importance of the diversity. To fulfill the demand, it needs the cultural sensitiveness, rainbow coalition and negotiation as well as compromise pluralistically. The ethnic tension and the certain stake groups can be acc1erated and the consequence is that there is a competition to achieve the limited resources, such as jobs, housing, political power, etc.

The Chance of Learning Tolerance, Respect and Recognition

During the periods of transition that has not ended yet, the new awareness to begin to reinterpret upon the ideology Pancasila has emerges for some Indonesian people. In the last five years the congealment of state ideology has felt, as before, it had been dominated by the single interpretation of the New Order regime, in which its implementation reluctantly used the force through both the state apparatus, such as: military, police and intelligence, and ideological apparatus, such as education institutions, especially civic education and religious education. The awareness is conducive to rejuvenate the state ideology Pancasila in order to reorient the nation-state.

The good chance of teaching for tolerance, respect and recognition is also opened through Bill no.20/2003 on National Education System. The bill gives a chance to diversity in holding the education institutions to consider the difference of student, teacher and environment background. This bill also gives a new hope of reducing and omitting the prejudice among the people of different religions. Article 12 states: “Every student has a right to accept the religious teaching from the same religious teacher.” It has a connection with the compulsory of every school to provide a teacher of a certain religion when there are at least 10 students who have certain religion or belief in the school. Before the bill was effective, the religion based education institutions did not give any chances to the students who had other religion to learn their own religion at school.

Since that year, the government through National Education Department has determined a new curriculum, Competency Based Curriculum. Basically, there is no significant difference between curriculum 2004 and curriculum 1994. Nevertheless, the new curriculum provides a chance for developing the learning process of multicultural attitude and behavior, such as tolerance, mutual-respect, mutual-understanding and recognition upon religious, ethnic and cultural difference and diversity. It shall happen unless these two following chances can be applied, as they should be:

First, the teaching and learning method should emphasize on the active, creative, effective and fun process (PAKEM). Through the methods, a teacher should understand the student’s basic competency and develop other competency as well as increase the capacity of the available competency. PAKEM has been run by implementing the School Based Management since 1999 as the result of cooperation between UNESCO- UNICEF and the National Education Department. The implementation of PAKEM has been done in Teacher Working Group (KKG) and Headmaster Working Group. The former helps the teacher in arranging the teaching materials, method and its development.

Second, curriculum 2004 emphasizes on evaluating the process not the result and it is reflected on the portfolio evaluation model. The implementation of the portfolio evaluation emphasizes on the student’s development process. By applying this evaluation, the teacher can collect and monitor the student’s learning achievement. In order to achieve the learning objective of tolerance, respect and recognition, the portfolio can be used to: 1) See the process and result of learning attitude, behavior and skill of living together; 2) Adapt the target and objective of curriculum that are connected to attitude, behavior and skill of living together; and 3) Arrange and evaluate the aspects of attitude, behavior and skill of living together on every level of evaluation.

At last, in conformity with the application of Competency Based Curriculum, the local contents approach in the curriculum should be considered. Through this approach teacher can deliver the learning of attitude, behavior and multicultural skills, internalize them and make the students accustomed to behave in tolerance, respect and recognition ways with deeper, wider understanding and practice in accordance with the local needs and context.

Alternative Curriculum of Inter-Religious Education

Bearing in mind that the diversity of archipelago wealth and the reality, which the efforts of managing the diversity has failed for last four decades, it is urgent to create alternative of inter-religious education for multicultural virtues.6 It is “inter-religious education in order to implant the awareness of importance of living together in diversity and difference of religions in the spirits of equality, mutual-trust, mutual-understanding and respect the similarity, difference and uniqueness of religions, involved in good relations and interdependency, in the conditions of mutual-hearing and accepting the difference in perspective on one problem and others by having open mind; to find the best way in overcoming the conflict and to create peace by giving forgiveness and doing anti-violent actions.” (For detail alternative content of its curriculum, see table II). The inter-religious education transforms “learning of the other religions” into “deconstruction” of the power relation and religious privileges. The inter-religious education criticism of this context is shown as follows: If it is true that there is the “other” religion, then what does it mean by this “otherness,” and from what and who does it “differentiate”; according to the cultural perspective, what should be understood is “uniqueness,” “differentiation” and “difference” itself? In micro scale, a religious teacher may be able to ask differently about: Can the teaching I am doing in the classroom help the student to feel “comfortable” to sit side by sided with other student who has different religion?

The continuity of the previous step is the change from only celebrating diversity into defending and struggling for justice. Inviting the teacher and student to celebrate diversity is not a bad thing even it is useful to introduce the wealth of their world. Nevertheless, the celebration should be followed by new efforts to defend and struggle for cultural, religious justice. The teacher together with the students should reflect themselves; whether they are ready to be isolated people because of many aspects; whether there is a readiness to celebrate the difference in a condition where they are suppressed continuously. Those questions are to make people aware that suppression-oppression of culture/religion is only beneficial for one group and sacrifices another, because there is tyrannical majority upon minority or anarchic minority upon majority.

Inter-religious education needs to change the focus from the objective into the real influence and impact. It means that the struggle to maintain the religious justice is not adequate only by stating it on the learning objectives. It needs to be applied on a real framework. In other words, a good intention becomes only an idea when the way of education works is still colored by a wrong orientation and oppressive system. Likewise, the struggle has not achieved the degree of certainty when it is only supported by theological and philosophical argument on justice, as mentioned in the statement of school’s vision and mission, while at the same time it fails in reflecting and implementing the justice on the education practice. We need new breakthroughs to solve the congealment of education world in overcoming the deadlock of management of diversity and political recognition.

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[1] See how Tarmidzi Taher analyzed the problems and his hope that the ideology Pancasila and its leadership toward 21 century is used for expansion the harmonious life of religious communities, as stated in his work: Aspiring for the middle path: Religious harmony in Indonesia (Jakarta: Censis, 1997) especially p.13-20. Unfortunately, his hope failed, only few years after he did not occupy the Ministry of religious Affairs in Indonesia, following various communal conflicts happened in the last 5 years.

[2] The Theological Frame of Harmonious Life of Religious Communities in Indonesia ( Jakarta: Balitbang Agama DEPAG RI,1997 )1997, Published in bilingual-Indonesia and Englisah