First Language-Based Multicultural Education

A. Chaedar Alwasilah

Many have attributed the failure of education in Indonesia to the following: (a) centralized policy of education, (b) lack of professionalism on the part of educational bureaucrats, and (c) lack of political will on the part of the government to invest resources in education. The centralized policy, however, seems to be the most devastating one that has destroyed almost all the potentials possible to improve education.
Since its pre-independence times, Indonesia has long been a country of multilingual, multiethnic, and multireligious population, for whom to live in differences is a matter of necessity. Under the pretext of promoting a national culture, the centralized policy has treated the ethnic groups indiscriminatingly, thus denying the local genius to grow and generate new cultures. Thus the fading local culture is now confronted with the Western and popular culture globally-promoted almost 24 hours a day.
First language—along with its inherent local cultures--represents the local genius, yet in our national education its existence has been marginalized. The UNESCO once recommended the use of first language as the medium of instruction. Cognitively, it is the first language acquired by students, and socially it is the language used for interaction in their immediate environment.
The recommendation is still relevant with the current situation where the local government (be provincial or district one) through the decentralization policy has the authority to manage education. Using Sundanese as the case of study, I would propose a model of mother tongue-based multicultural education.

Demystifying Bhineka Tunggal Ika
The motto Bhineka Tunggal Ika (diversity in unity)—along with the national hymns--has long been propagated among Indonesians since their primary schooling. Overseas at international gatherings, our leaders are proud of introducing Indonesia as a big and beautiful country of multilingual, multiethnic, and multireligious societies; yet by virtue of
Bhineka Tunggal Ika, the country has been united and successful in fighting against the colonial forces. The proclamation of (political) independence in 1945 is indeed the biggest achievement of Bhineka Tunggal Ika.
In its developments, however, the motto seems to have lost its vigor and significance. Indonesia remains one of the less developed countries in Asia. In other words, the motto has failed to enhance economic and social developments. The reform era since 1998 has shown even greater failures of the nation. They include a series of horizontal as well as vertical conflict in the country, issues of separatism, and—on top of all—the separation of East Timor from Indonesia. Religion has been a mandatory school subject, yet it does not guarantee any religious harmony. Religion subjects in schools do not deal with social realities. Instead, they tend to be exclusive, dogmatic, and traditional.
Apparently the government has failed to develop the nation as a complete whole. The politics was there, but there was no political education for the citizens. The centralized policies on education were aimed at securing the continuity of national developments at the expense of political education. The pluralistic society is not provided with multicultural education. Bhineka Tunggal Ika was used the founding fathers of the Republic to establish the culture, yet for most of contemporary Indonesian multiculturalism is a foreign concept (Parsudi Sparlan cited by Rozi: 2003). Thus, pluralism in the New Order era was established on a fragile social structure impossible to fix in a decade.
By way of comparison, in the U.S. now the concept of the melting pot is critically examined. Some groups have now held it in disfavor, because it is perceived as stripping different ethnic groups of their cultures and identities. “The price of the melting pot is that most of these people have lost their histories, customs, and languages and have now accepted the common history of the United States as their own” (Ornstein and Hunkins 1998: 363). Thus, cultural pluralism or cultural diversity has been suggested as the guiding concept for a new America.

Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism is not the same as cultural and social plurality, which has long been in existence in Indonesia. Multiculturalism is always contextualized in politics, democracy, justice, equity and equality. The proponent of multicultural education believes that students have a right to see themselves in and to learn about themselves from the existing curriculum. It is obvious that a centralized curriculum will be counter-productive toward a multicultural education programs.
We need a massive ethnic education. It is imperative that the existing curriculum be restructured to have more varied meaningful, and adequate ethnic emphasis. This change should be nationwide and take place in all school aspects so that all students will grow up with a sense of their specific identity, develop a deeper understanding of people of other cultural, ethnic, and religious groups, and acquire the cultural diversity that characterize our nation.
Following are elaborations of multicultural education.
• Multicultural education does not mean the same thing for all children, classroom, and schools. There should be subjects common to all groups and subjects specific for certain ethnic groups. Now what is nationally examined throughout includes mathematics. Science, and Indonesian, and English.
• It does not mean that the instructional content should be confined to informing students only about their own ethnic group, but rather that the instruction should be geared from that perspectives. To develop a sense of nationalism, all learners must know about both the majority and minority cultures.
• Multicultural education views ethnic values as a local genius that has the potential to be explored for shared national purposes. The new concept calls for understanding and appreciating differences among people so that ethnic groups can maintain their customs, folk mores, and languages and still be able to participate in the common civic, mainstream culture.
• Multicultural is an orientation to education, to curriculum and the teaching of it. Following Ornstein and Hunkins (1998), teaching materials developers are suggested to do the following:
1. Introducing materials that are multiracial, multiethnic, and non-sexist. Teachers should understand and respect the interest and cultural background students they teach.
2. Teaching values that promote cultural diversity and individuality. In other words, the materials should reflect the diversity of our pluralistic society.
3. Incorporating various cultural and ethnic activities in the classroom and school-community programs.
4. Encouraging multilingualism and multiple dialects. In other words, mastery of more than one or two languages is encouraged.
5. Emphasizing multicultural teacher education programs, in which the curriculum integrates ethnic and cultural experiences throughout.

Why mother tongue-based?
The centralistic government since 1959 up to the fall of Soeharto in 1998 was a strategy to perpetuate the power. The publication was strictly controlled both at central and regional levels; hence creativity did not exist. The citizens were terrorized by the jargon coined by the government such as daerahisme, sukuisme, saparatisme, antek nekolim, anti-Nasakom, ekstrim kiri, ekstrim kanan,SARA, etc. (Adimihardja: 1999). This cultural terrorism has extinguished both linguistic and cultural developments throughout the country. We expect the school, especially the primary one, to contribute to the process of revitalizing and reinvigorating the ethnic languages and cultures.
Mother tongue is essential for multicultural education. It is through the mother tongue that one’s cultural creativity first and predominantly develops. Psychologically, the mother tongue is internalized as symbols to express and discern the environment. It is through this language cultural values and religious values are internalized. Sociologically, the mother tongue is the symbol of identity. Students develop a natural attachment to the first language. The mother tongue is acquired in the primary environment, while the second language is acquired in the secondary environment. Their use will also suggest different environments (Alwasilah: 2000).
There are more than 400 languages in Indonesia, of which eight ethnic languages stand out to be the most dominant as indicated in the following table.

Language Number of Speakers
1. Javanese 60,267,461
2. Sundanese 24,155,962
3. Madurese 6,792,447
4. Minangkabause 3,527,726
5. Bugis 3,228,742
6. Batakese 3,120,047
7. Banjarese 2,755,337
8. Balinese 2,589,256

(Alwasilah 2000:67)

The eight major ethnic languages listed above must have the potential to develop linguistically and culturally as part of “local level decision making” (Adimiharja: 2003). It is interesting to note that there are many international scholars and experts who live in West Java for a relatively long period of time to study a certain aspect of Sundanese culture such food, batik, language, mysticism, history, gamelan, etc.
Multicultural education should play a role in revitalizing the ethnic languages and their inherent culture. The first international conference on Sundanese Culture held in Bandung in 2001 was held—among other things--as a response to the decreasing pride of Sundanese language and culture among Sundanese, especially the youth. To revitalize culture, I think, there are three steps to follow, namely (1) understanding and developing awareness of the culture, (2) collective planning, and (3) creativity generating, all of which should be facilitated through education (Alwasilah: 2001a). The conference has made several constructive recommendations, among others as follows:
To maintain and develop Sundanese culture and its all aspects, the agents of socialization such as public figures, religious figures, families, schools, mass media, and other informal institutions should function to the full. Besides, the regional policies and regulations regarding local culture maintenance should be operationalized and to be enforced consistently (Alwasilah: 2001a).

Cultural revitalization of Sundanese culture has taken in place in various forms, among others as follows:
1. The establishment of cultural foundations, such as The Rancage (literally: creative) Foundation, which consistently promotes Sundanese cultures through various programs.
2. The publication of Sunda Lana (literally: perpetuating Sundanese), an international journal of Sundanese culture.
3. The publication of selected Sundanese poems in English and French.
4. The publication of Sundanese-English Dictionary, compiled by R.R. Hardjadibrata (2003).
5. The publication of Apa Siapa Orang Sunda (Who is Who of Sundanese) edited by Ajip Rosidi (2003).
6. The publication of Ensiklopedi Sunda (2000), of 719 pages.
7. The establishment of publishers devoted to promoting Sundanese books.

Sundanese, like other major ethnic languages, has been used as a medium of instruction in the first 3 or 4 years of primary schooling in West Java, and it is still used as a means of daily communication. However, there is a tendency to use Indonesian, rather than Sundanese, among the youth and in the Sundanese family especially in big cities. In other words the primary schooling has failed to revitalize Sundanese to serve its native speakers of almost 30 million. This is not a surprise at all, as Fiske states, “School decentralization schemes often succeed or fail for reasons that have more to do with politics than with technical design” (1996: v).
First language planning is said to be successful if the following indicators are achieved:
1. It is used as a medium of instruction at primary levels of schooling.
2. It is used as a tool of expression and communication in a wider context, such as mass media.
3. It is used as a language of science, technology, and arts.
4. First language literature becomes more developed.
5. More research is done on first language and its literature.

Conclusion and Suggestions
Finally I tentatively define mother tongue-based education as the use of the mother tongue and its inherent cultural aspects for educational purposes especially at primary levels of education. Evidence shows that the use of mother tongue as a medium of instruction or as a school subject does not necessarily revitalize the language and its culture. Ideally the students are proficient linguistically as well as culturally. However, in critical environments such as in big cities where people of different ethnicity live, it is much more important to educate students in order that they live up with the common cultural values of the language than to coerce them to be fluent in it. Incorporating first language literature into Indonesian and foreign language curricula and performing traditional music on campus are strategies in multicultural education that would attract not only the native speakers but also non-native speakers of the ethnic language. People of diverse voices who also share a common voice of the mainstream culture are not going to be silenced. They will be heard for example by creating on-campus and off-campus programs in which interethnic, inter-religious, and intercultural communication is maintained. The idea is to establish unity based on diversity.






References

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*) Paper presented at International Seminar on Multicultural Education: The Role of Higher Education amid the Age of Globalization, UNJ, 6-8 September 2004.
**) Professor and Dean of Faculty of Language and Arts Education, The Indonesia University of Education, Bandung.