ENGLISH TEACHER TEACHING MORALITY, WHY NOT?

By Danarti samsudin)*

 

The System of education is repeatedly blamed for the morality decadence as shown with violent actions, anarchic protests, and criminal practices in every part of regions nation wide because it has so far failed to produce intact Indonesians people who have mental and spiritual health.

                Our country is suffering from prolonged multidimensional crisis, either economically, socially, culturally, or morally as well. It is due to irresponsible, corrupted state leaders and has resulted in the existing chaotic condition.

                In the contrary, Indonesia is famous both regionally and internationally for an unchallenged outstanding tract of record in term of corruption. It all goes to prove that the morality of leaders in this republic has already decomposed.

                In response to the chaotic condition, the people often express the disappointments with their own ways by doing violent actions, anarchic protests, and criminal practices in every part of regions nationwide.  To this regard, the system of education is repeatedly blame for the morality decadence because it has failed to produce intact Indonesian people who have noble character, mental and spiritual health, firm personality, and have sense of responsibility for the community and nation.

                More regrettably, people at all levels have confessed a saying Time is Money as their life style, including students. The students consider going to school as a process of getting a good job in state or private institutions, not as a process of maturing their social and intelligent competences. As a result, such attitude will only produce materialistic generations who neglect religious and moral value. It conflicts with the objective of education proposed by the founding father of education Ki Hajar Dewantoro, that education must be aimed at providing intact Indonesian people who have dignity and morality.

                As a matter of fact the national education system quite clearly states the objectiveness but the implementation still fails here and there.  What’s wrong with the educational system? In my opinion, there are factors contributing to the failure. One of them is that almost all schools associate clever students are those having good grades without heeding their morality. It all constitutes the impact of the final exam system (UNAS).

                In this case, all the schools merely put the top of priority on certain disciplines of knowledge such as physics, mathematics, Indonesian and the like and over look the religious and moral value.

                A few years ago, the government once issued a policy on the educational curriculum by inserting the so – called Budi Pekerti, noble character, as one of the compulsory subject matter taught in school. Since then, the teachers found it hard to combine the subject matter taught at school with morality.

                It sounds very simple to teach a subject matter while instilling moral value to the students, but It is very hard to practice. Hence, we need a lot of experiences to do so. How about teaching English? It is also very simple and gives more funds.

                In teaching language, there are several prominent aspects we have to recognize such as structure, vocabularies, meaning, and culture as well. Culture is the most important aspects that we can combine with the morality. It entails that we have to study more about the culture before teaching morality.

                Morality itself is not a kind of particular culture that is traditionally accustomed to people in a certain society but it is supposed to be a conduct largely accepted by human being. An expression of moral conduct, therefore, will greatly depend upon the cultural background. However, moral values can be implanted with the cultural expressions. The following are the samples of expressions in language teaching and testing.

1.       Respecting to the elder ( including parents and teachers )

2.       Processing a fair – minded attitude.

3.       Having affection toward the younger.

4.       Having sympathy to the persons with unfortunate/poor conditions.

5.       Having no jealousy to those with their luckiness.

6.       Demanding students not to cheat etc.

The teacher should have high moral sensitivity and continuously teaches moral values to the students by giving some examples and moral education informally. Hopefully, they find themselves aware automatically that having moral conducts will provide them with a wide range of advantages while immoral conducts will bring them into punishments.

                                                                                                )*The writer is a teacher of SMP Negeri 9 Surakarta