Sumber ilustrasi: Magnific
2 Mei 2026 08.53 WIB – Akar
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Desanomia [02.05.2026] Every day, education gives rise to various reflections. These range from the most immediate issue, namely the quality of education, to the problem of educational costs. In terms of quality, what is generally highlighted is the condition in which university graduates fail to find employment, or the view that higher education curricula are incompatible with industry.
Regarding educational costs, what continues to be criticized is a tendency called the commercialization of education. Schools have become no different from sellers of seats. Every year, seats are contested, and each family is willing to pay a high price.
Meanwhile, once students enter the education system, what they receive is not a form of learning that enables them to grow into whole human beings, but quite the opposite. Competition teaches them to think by excluding others in order to succeed.
What very rarely receives reflection is the science of education itself. However, if we look back, it becomes clear that the pioneers of national education did not merely build their own schools. They also developed their own methods of educating, distinct from the colonial model. Unfortunately, educational methods born from the spirit of emancipation did not receive sufficient attention and were not developed as a national way of bringing forth whole human beings with noble character. What has taken place instead is a tendency to import methods that are increasingly detached from the life of the nation itself.
And yet, as held by the pioneers of national education, there was an awareness and conviction that a nation which does not develop its own science of education will slowly lose the ability to understand itself.
Education is not merely a matter of schools, curricula, examinations, or certificates. Education is the way a nation answers the most fundamental question: what kind of human being does it seek to bring forth within the framework of nationhood?
Within education lies a view of life, of goodness, of freedom, of responsibility, and of a shared future. Thus, education is always philosophical, even though it often appears in a very practical form.
This means that if a nation does not build its own science of education, that nation will tend to borrow another nation’s way of thinking about human beings and society. Such borrowing is not always bad, but it becomes dangerous when accepted without criticism. Every educational theory is born from a particular historical soil. There are social experiences, political interests, economic structures, and cultural values that shape that theory. Therefore, educational models from elsewhere cannot be treated as ready-made universal truths.
Something that succeeds in one place may prove unsuitable, even destructive, in another.
The first consequence is estrangement. Children learn many things, but they do not necessarily learn to recognize the life of their own nation. Schools may become spaces that appear advanced, but it will remain detached from the rice fields, the sea, the village, the city, their mother tongue, traditions, historical wounds, and the real problems of society.
The second consequence is intellectual dependence. A nation that does not formulate its own science of education will always wait for formulas from outside: theories from outside, standards from outside, and measures of success from outside. In such a condition, education no longer become a path toward emancipation. Education turns into a long training in adapting oneself to measures created by others.
The third consequence is the weakening of creative power. Teachers, academics, and policymakers become busier imitating than interpreting their own experience. Yet a living science of education must grow out of a struggle with reality: from real classrooms, real children, real languages, and real social problems.
The fourth consequence is the blurring of the nation’s moral direction. Without a philosophy of education formulated by the nation itself, the question of human purpose is easily replaced by the question of market needs alone. In the end, education merely produces workers, not free human beings; it generates competence, but not necessarily wisdom; it trains people for competition, but not necessarily for civility.
The most important point is that the historical step of developing one’s own science of education is not a sign of closing oneself off from the world. On the contrary, a mature nation is able to learn from anywhere, while still thinking with its feet firmly planted on its own soil.
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.
