Who do you think is the owner of every child?
Every child belongs to nature. It is nature that owns the children. Parents are just intermediary through which children come into the world. It would be useless for parents to dictate the children’s education because parents belong to the past whereas children belong to the future.
Parents can, however, provide values, saying, for instance, that education is important. Parents can provide norms that are sustainable but they have to leave the final decision about the future to the children, because it has to conform to the latter’s free choices.
I myself committed a blunder when deciding on which directions to go for my children. I wanted my son Michael Hermawan to study marketing and my daughter, Stefani Hermawan, to study macro-economics. The former went to the University of Texas at Austin and got a Master’s degree at Kellogg Graduate School of Management while the latter took macro-economics at the University of Michigan but this was because they had pursued senior high school education in America.
But later on, my son altered his direction to study finance at Kellogg and my daughter followed him to study macro-economics. And what happens now? She is now in furniture retail business in Kemang, South Jakarta.
Now I realize that I should not have directed them to take those courses. I must admit that made a big mistake. So every child belongs to the future and every child belongs to the society that he or she will serve. Education is just a bridge through which to reach the goal of serving the community.
Why should people go to school?
So that they may be a lot more systematic in acquiring basic knowledge. I have to say ‘to acquire basic knowledge,’ because for a person to succeed in life there is often no correlation between knowledge acquired at school and the success attained in society. I don’t mean to say that people who are smart in formal education cannot attain success in society. But what I say is that there is no direct correlation between educational excellence and life success in society.
There are some people who do succeed but many more don’t for merely relying on educational brilliance. Many smart people have difficulty socializing within their own communities. So often they only have good IQ, but lack EQ, and poor in SQ. Often people with good education are not very good in interpersonal relations. So vertically they are excellent, but horizontally they aren’t.
Do you think Indonesian schools have implemented the right curricula?
In the whole world, school curricula is always changing. Even in developed countries, changes for the better always take place. People are always not satisfied with what they have achieved because the world where the students are about to apply their knowledge also keep changing. Even in America, though we think they are excellent, they are too not satisfied with their achievements and therefore keep on upgrading their curricula. Even Harvard Business School is now being challenged by school like, say, Babson Business School. So if you ask me whether or not our curriculum is already good, I must say we need to keep on upgrading it. But here everytime the curricula changes, it always stir up controversy. People always critize that if we change minister, the curricula is also bound to suffer drastic change. So I am also confused myself. Sometimes we have to understand that maybe the time has come for a change.
What’s your definition of a good teacher?
An ideal teacher is one that facilitates the process of learning. He or she should not be preaching. Vertically-oriented teachers often think they know best and impose upon the learners what they want. Horizontally-oriented teachers are those who facilitate the process of learning in such a way that students develop naturally.
What do you think is the biggest issue in Indonesia’s education?
Our education is too vertically oriented, we aren’t horizontal enough. Our teachers still position themselves vertically, believing that they should always be placed much higher than the learners. In developed countries where creativity gets high priority, teachers do not teach creativity but facilitate the process of learning to enable learners’ creativity to grow. CA.
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