Sumber ilustrasi: Magnific
3 Mei 2026 09.49 WIB – Akar
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Desanomia [03.05.2026] Has the education currently being carried out fully understood that it exists within a republic? Or, on the contrary, has the education currently being carried out not only failed to understand this, but also become something that may stand against the very purpose of the republic? How are we to examine what is now taking place? Since this is a republican problem, the public itself must answer and resolve it.
This description takes the position of offering a possible optic through which to examine what is currently unfolding. It may be framed as follows:
Republican education is education that regards the human being not as raw material for a system, but as the origin of shared life. Human beings are not educated merely to fit the labor market, obey administration, or serve the economic machine. Human beings are educated so that they are able to understand themselves, understand others, and take part in shaping the common world.
This kind of education begins from the understanding that the republic is not merely a form of state. The republic is a way of living together that rejects the concentration of public affairs in the hands of a few. In a republic, shared life does not belong to kings, elites, bureaucracy, the market, or powerful groups. Shared life is the affair of citizens, because citizens are the moral source of every public mandate.
For that reason, education with a republican character cannot be limited to teaching knowledge about the state. This kind of education must form human beings who are aware that the shared space of life must be thought through, cared for, and built. Citizens must not stop at being residents who are recorded, voters who are counted, workers who are absorbed, or consumers who are targeted. Citizens must become subjects capable of speaking, weighing, choosing, and taking responsibility.
The deepest foundation of republican education lies in human dignity. Every person possesses reason, will, experience, and the capacity to form meaning. For that reason, education must not treat human beings as empty vessels waiting to be filled. Education must awaken the powers already present within the human being: the power to think, to feel, to judge, to create, and to work together.
At this point, republican education differs from technocratic education. Technocratic education often asks what skills the system requires. Republican education asks a deeper question: what kind of human being is needed so that shared life remains free, just, and dignified? The first question places the human being as an instrument. The second question places the human being as a source of renewal.
Education directed only toward employment often turns the future into a narrow corridor. Students are imagined as walking toward places already provided by business, offices, industry, or bureaucracy. Republican education opens another question: how can human beings create work, create value, create relationships, create institutions, and create new possibilities for shared life?
Republican education in this sense is not anti-work. This kind of education precisely expands the meaning of work. Work is not understood merely as a position within the economic structure, but as an act of creating value for oneself, for others, and for the shared space of life. Employment is not merely a place to earn a living, but one form of human presence in the world.
The center of republican education is the formation of free human beings. A free human being is not one who is detached from every bond. Freedom is not the liberty to live as one pleases. A free human being is one who is able to bind oneself consciously to the common good, without losing reason, dignity, and personal responsibility.
Within this framework, education must cultivate self-awareness. A person needs to understand that no one is naturally subordinate to any power. No human being is born merely to be ruled, used, ordered around, or adjusted to fit something else. Education must ignite the awareness that every human being has the right to think and the obligation to be responsible for that thought.
Self-awareness alone, however, is not enough. The republic requires civic awareness. Human beings live among other human beings, in a space of interrelations, with consequences that touch one another. Education must teach that freedom always carries consequences. Rights cannot be separated from responsibility; freedom cannot be separated from care; personal success cannot be separated from the general condition.
Republican education must also form public reason. Public reason is the capacity to think beyond narrow interests. Within it lies the ability to listen, to test reasons, to distinguish reality from propaganda, to read social symptoms, and to formulate opinions that can be accounted for. Without public reason, society easily turns into a noisy crowd, but one poor in judgment.
Because the republic does not live from memorization, republican education must touch real experience. Students need to experience collective work, deliberation, problem-solving, resource management, and the formation of collective initiatives. The republic is not born from lectures about the republic, but from the practice of living as citizens who meet, think, work, and decide together.
Beyond that, republican education must teach the formation of institutions. Citizens should not only be invited to express opinions; they also need to learn how to arrange rules, distribute roles, manage forums, build organizations, and uphold collective decisions. At this level, education does not merely produce intelligent individuals, but human beings capable of giving form to shared life.
This kind of education also contains an ethics of power. In a republic, power is not private property, not a family inheritance, and not an instrument for subjugating others. Power is a mandate that must always be returned to the public interest. Education must form human beings who understand when to lead, when to restrain themselves, when to criticize, when to listen, and when to submit to legitimate collective decisions.
At the deepest level, republican education is education in the freedom of thought. Human beings are not trained to memorize dogma, but to examine foundations, see assumptions, ask from the root, and not easily submit to symbolic authority. A republic can live only when citizens possess epistemic courage: the courage to know, to judge, to state, and to repair.
Republican education may be understood as the process of forming free human beings who are capable of becoming subjects of shared life. This education transforms human beings from objects of a system into shapers of the common world. In the Indonesian context, education with a republican character means reviving the meaning of independence within the way education is carried out: forming citizens who are not dependent mentally, economically, politically, or epistemically, but who are capable of creating a life that is more just, more humane, and more free.
What do you think? (njd)
Note: This article was made as part of a dedicated effort to bring everyday life around us to our minds.
