Special thanks to the Jakarta International School for extending the invitation to John Abbott and Terence Ryan to attend their international conference.

Introduction

The President of the Initiative, John Abbott, gave the Keynote Speech at the 18th Annual South East Asia Teachers’ and Counselors’ Conference in Jakarta in late November. I, as John’s research assistant, had the good fortune to attend the conference with him, and this afforded me the opportunity to speak with many of the 800 delegates and presenters from international schools throughout the region. I quickly discovered people wanted to talk about what John had said in order to “make sense of it” in their own working and living environments, and subsequently these various encounters caused me to think anew what the Initiative was saying.

My conversations with these “risk-taking educators” took place in the capital of a country that is facing an extreme economic depression (“The number of people living below the poverty line, roughly defined as able to afford one decent meal a day, will have jumped from 22 million in 1996 to an estimated 90 million people, 44 percent of the population, by the start of 1999.” The Economist). The problems of the economy were compounded by rioting in the streets which had killed at least 30 people during the week of the conference alone. On the day John and I flew out of the country several Christian churches had been burnt to the ground and an enraged mob had literally torn apart some of the parishioners. It was in this rather explosive environment that my various discussions about learning and the possible future of education took place, and so I am certain my perspective on the issues below are more emotionally laden than they would normally have been. Yet, without such emotions I probably wouldn’t have had the incentive to write this article.

Apprenticeship

John’s presentation touched on a theme which many people found interesting and that was the concept of “apprenticeship” (see note below) as the dominant way in which most societies throughout history have inducted young people into their cultural roles. Teachers were curious about this model of education because they saw examples of it in their midst everyday. Coincidentally, a day after John’s speech a group of us from the conference went to a local restaurant where a puppet master (the dalang) was performing a story from the Ramayana (an epic poem from India well known in Java). Behind the puppet master, whose skills were greatly respected by the Indonesians in attendance, sat his six or seven year old grandson. As the puppet master finished with a particular puppet he passed it back to his “apprentice” who put the puppet back into its specific place on the puppet rack. In this way the child was modeling the skills of the puppet master, and a person afterwards noted this was a brilliant example of the type of apprenticeship learning John had talked about during his presentation.

Yet, it was observed by an American, surely the economic realities of the late 20th century are changing so rapidly that such a slow, gentle, and indeed very human form of apprenticeship into one particular role, no matter how much it is currently valued by society, isn’t enough. It was asked, “Isn’t the most important skill in a modern economy the ability to take lessons and values from one particular field of experience in order to apply them in novel ways to other situations? Isn’t this the essence of innovation, and isn’t this what ‘post-industrial’ economies are increasingly all about? How can developing countries improve on the natural teaching of apprenticeship to develop young people committed to their cultures, yet confident enough to take on economic and social roles considerably different to those of their mentors?”

Cultural Values and Economics

The social significance of these questions was brought home to the conference participants when we heard the conference’s closing speaker, Debra H. Yatim. Yatim works in Jakarta as a media expert and provided an overview of the clash within Indonesia between Western values and indigenous values and beliefs. She showed a video clip of students several days before the conference arguing face to face with soldiers, and she explained this was revolutionary because such a confrontation was in complete contrast to Indonesian culture which was based on obedience to those in positions of authority (Dharma). The students, argued Yatim, were taking the lessons they had learned from their “Western education” and putting them into practice on the streets of Jakarta. The result, she said, was chaos and society running “amok.” There was some question as to whether this violence and suffering was a necessary step towards the development of a more democratic, just and open society, or if in fact it was a step towards increased lawlessness, death and the eventual disintegration of a multi-ethnic Indonesia.

Yatim argued that the powerful forces of “globalization” (both in terms of economic change and in the thinking of the elite – i.e. Western liberal values) were colliding with the local culture (Karma – God’s law and Takdir – Fate). She made the point that “education only has meaning if it is related to culture.” A participant asked Yatim if she thought “Indonesia was moving towards democracy?” Yatim responded that yes, in fact, she believed Indonesia was moving in that direction.

After Yatim’s presentation I thought about what she had said and I wondered if Indonesian democracy (as I understood it as a Westerner) wasn’t paradoxical in light of the comment “education only has meaning if it is related to culture.” Was Western style democracy actually a part of Indonesian culture? Later I spoke with a fellow American who muddled my thinking further by noting that there really wasn’t a monolithic Indonesian culture, but rather a mosaic of indigenous cultures all under the banner of Indonesia. He shared that he was recently in Bali where he was told openly by a waiter at a seaside restaurant that the people of Bali were going to secede from Indonesia. Later, in speaking with several young teachers from Timor I learned that the tradition of “liberal democracy” was foreign to the different ethnic groups within Indonesia, and that in fact for most people it was an imported concept from the West.

So, the concept of democracy that I had been raised to value as a universal principle was in fact a foreign import in Indonesia. This realization shattered my naiveté, and being trained as a social scientists who lived in Poland during its early transition from communism to democracy it also raised the following questions. How malleable is democracy, and does it emerge only through “revolution?” Can a country make a planned transition from authoritarianism to democracy? In places like Indonesia is true participatory democracy only possible at the expense of the existing elite and the nation-state? Weren’t most nation-states crafted by military force without any consideration of the interests and values of many of the indigenous ethnic groups?

Wouldn’t ethnic groups that have felt dominated for decades in fact chose to leave nation-states that have rarely reflected their interests or cultural values? What sort of chaos would such late 20th century self-determination spawn? (Robert Lansing, US Secretary of State in 1919 remarked that “the right of self-determination is a phrase simply loaded with dynamite…It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives). How can America’s exhortation of liberal democracy be balanced with its acceptance of the primacy of nation-states? Are developing countries destined to follow the same bloody paths of development we in the West charted?

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