Rethinking Education: Holding Education Back to The Transmission of Civilization

“Education is the transmission of civilization.” Education, as Will Durant quoted, becomes one of the way to transform the life of our society towards civilizations. It is one of the key to elevate the human resources and the socio-cultural lives nowadays. The idealism of education should be put as our first concern in the implementation of education.

The early generation transmitted knowledge by memorizing, writing on woods or leaves or bones, and creating new invention depending on nature. The transfer of knowledge also creates the social relationship, the more intense on communication, and the higher dependence among the citizens of the world into a dynamic culture. The other important thing is it also creates new discoveries. The new discoveries create the higher technology. The technology equips people with better and simpler way of communicating. Thus, it embraces the world towards civilization.

Education is one of the basic human rights. It promises the society to gain educational support from the government. Specifically in Indonesia, the government sets up the main goals of education, one of the important one is to deliver the skill of the young generation to contribute their knowledge in society. However, education in Indonesia still needs improvement especially in its quality and accessibility indicated by a low Human Development Index and a high unemployment rate coming from the educated citizens (most of the unemployment ironically come from high school and university graduates).

Education system in order to be able to meet global challenges should consider the process of transferring moral values, entrepreneurial, and community service skill. However, the country education system does not fully support the freedom of creativity in searching the student's interest by giving so much pressure to master about 14 subjects in each semester. The incentive of getting good mark or passing the final exam have been the only goal to be achieved creating pragmatic mindset of our students. The standardized exam, the over-changing curriculum, and the low quality of the learning process have become such unbreakable-chains of problems in our education. There should be a reform in our education if we want to generate bright minds of our scholars by building a quality, process-oriented, and dynamic education. Therefore, there needs to be a balance in our education system, i.e. to build character, creativity, life wisdom, as well as the virtue of education itself.

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