Ide Untuk Pak Anies

 This is what I call the ‘Environmental Change Behavior Indifference’. This happens when the subjected person lacks the knowledge that change in environment should also correspond to the appropriate behavior expected in a particular environment. Similar self-conclusive assumptions made by the subjected person eliminate the essential difference that might exist in the different environments.

Take for example a female kindergarten teacher that’s been teaching for 5 years since her being 25 to 30 years old. Kindergarteners age from 4-5 years old. At 30 years old, she marries and a son is born. When she is 35, she has no trouble educating both her son and the kindergarteners at school because of the same age. Before and after that short one year of her life, her son is in the phase when he’s younger or older than her kindergarteners. Let’s say she reaches 45. Her son will be in high school and her kindergarteners will be, well, in kindergarten. She has to simultaneously educate a teenager and kindergarteners at the same time. There’s an obvious importance to take into account how to educate her son and her kindergarteners differently given the different environments.

Using the same logic, we can extrapolate this idea. Imagine a professor that has a doctorate degree in mathematics. Although he’s very good in his field of work, he won’t be able to be the project manager in a construction site. The same goes with a civil engineer who has many years of experience working in a construction site. He won’t be able to do research in fluid dynamics using computational modeling and complicated math as his fellow math’s professor, yet he has the ability to run a construction project building a bridge overleaping a cliff in southern France.

As obvious as it may seem, we sometimes lack the knowledge of switching behaviors in different environments. This is obvious because the fields of work in engineering, for example, are clearly categorized, different from those occurring in social sciences, or even life knowledge to view it in an extreme way.

I have often come across with people so respected in their field of work, forgetting that their field of work also has a limit. Individual people ranging from a housewife with small children who keeps telling young adults how to behave, to a PhD in Islamic Laws in the People’s Representative Council of a Pancasila-based democratic country Indonesia.

I’m nobody to blame them. It’s not their faults anyway. They have grown up as they had been raised. Scientific explanation is nowhere to be found. I do have a hypothesis though, that this happens because of the fact that we are always praised although we do not-so-good-of-a-job at school. And sometimes, we just do them just to get the praise from our teachers or our fellow learning mates. Yes, we can get motivations from them. Yes, we can be inspired to learn more from them. But by that only, we have forgotten the true essence of learning by the core.

Teachers have the responsibility to let children learn on their own, not just passing knowledge from their heads to the children’ only. That’s what radio transmitters do. Of course we still do need a national curriculum. What the teachers need to do though is not just to pass the knowledge inside the curriculum to the students, instead to also be the trigger to make the students want to learn it on their own. Teachers have to praise them in the right times, and in the right manner. When they do so, education succeeds. Future generations will not only be doctors that are experts in their fields, but will also know where to stop and respect for other fields of work. Because realistically speaking, no one will ever be doctors in all fields of work.

I’ve been studying in Japan for two years now. And that’s not a long enough time to grasp even half the knowledge of how the Japanese education is making Japanese socialize or interact with each other. But from what I see, Japanese, no matter what position they are (could be a professor, doctor, or a fellow student), when they want to give information to another person, in most times the term ‘かもしれません / kamo shiremasen’ is put in the end. Although this can be translated into the English word ‘maybe’, this term does not, with significance, bring along the sense of uncertainty.

For example, if my Japanese friend had read in the news that the price of Yen was decreasing, they would say it to me as the following: ‘I’ve read in the news that the price of Yen is decreasing kamo shiremasen’. Although they knew it for sure that the price of Yen was decreasing, they would say it in the way that they are not sure about it to give the sense of modesty. Frankly speaking, this is what I rarely see in the Indonesian environment, a slight kamo shiremasen that can actually make a big difference.