From Gayus Tambunan to critical literacy

Joseph Ernest Mambu ,  Salatiga   |  Tue, 04/06/2010 8:17 AM  |  Opinion

The case of recently detained tax official Gayus Tambunan, allegedly involved in embezzling billions of rupiah, has further highlighted the urgent necessity of character education, which was revived again some time ago after a spate of plagiarism at university level.
Being of a similar age to the 30-year-old new tycoon, I share almost the same experience of primary, secondary and tertiary education. That is, we are both products of the predominantly top-down culture, thanks to Soeharto’s New Order regime.
I suspect he was a brand-new college student in 1998 (I was in my third year) when Soeharto’s de jure reign was over, leading to the advent of the so-called “Reformation Era”.
The problem is that many of us, fellow young Indonesians, are still deeply rooted in Soeharto’s de facto character to varying degrees.
Though as an ethnic Batak, Gayus may not have thoroughly understood Soeharto’s Javanese motto mikul ndhuwur mendem njero (upholding one’s contribution to the country, and covering up their wrongdoings), he perpetuates the shrewdly misused adage.
We may ideally justify this Javanese belief when an imaginary leader, for instance, has been really successful in many ways and a person of integrity, both compensate for their excessive, yet pardonable, slips of tongue and err..s (hesitations) in formal speeches.
But Soeharto and Gayus are not the ideals to fit into the essence of the proverb. Whereas Soeharto consecrated himself as the “father of national development” and concealed glaring corruption charged to him, Gayus has persistently upheld his achievements to enrich his immediate and extended families, and was once victorious in having himself covered as well as freed from imprisonment.
Does character and literacy education à la Soeharto account for such rampant corruption nowadays? Yes, and not only that.
In fact, we have inherited a feudalistic mentality, particularly since the Dutch divide-and-rule politics that segregated our society into imbalanced power relations favoring the Dutch (now perpetuated by many Western people who like to impose “more prestigious education”), with either the ethnic Chinese or indigenous Indonesians, or now including those of Arab and Indian descent, usually being involved in conflict and yet succumbing to the swamping effect of Western capitalistic education.
Not all Western people are capitalistic at heart, I believe, but traditionally literacy education in a capitalist world (Indonesia included, to my dismay) has its own set of metaphors.
David Barton (1994) suggests five parameters that constitute a set of metaphors for literacy: Condition, response, means, goal and application.
In conventional (used interchangeably here with capitalist) literacy, the main condition that necessitates education be carried out is people’s ignorance.
In response to this condition, good initiatives have certainly been made to train the people in order for them to be literate by means of literacy instruction.
The goals are mastery of basic literacy (reading and writing) and numeracy skills that allow the people to function in the workplace.
Pleasant or neutral as it may sound thus far, however, the application ends up with quite a dire impact: Adherence to the market logic as determined by capital owners. This leads to unfair play between many of the haves and the have-nots, with the latter being exploited by the former.
In Indonesia, the latter often realize they must have a lot of money to exercise power. Oftentimes once the latter are rich and powerful by hook or by crook, their literacy and numeracy skills are employed to outsmart many of the have-nots and to keep them in a perpetually ignorant condition.
Or, if the ignorant have-nots want to rise out of their poverty, they will learn the very literacy skills of corruption, thus repeating the vicious cycle.
A critical set of metaphors for literacy should begin to be conceptualized and most importantly
practiced.
This critical literacy starts from the awareness of the condition that many people are deprived of resources owing to imbalanced power relations and oppression.
People’s empowerment is the logical response. This empowerment can be facilitated by advocacy or pressure groups committed to eradicating corrupt practices in multidimensional aspects of life. The twofold goal is clear: People are conscious of their civil rights, and do not violate other people’s rights through corruption.
I will suggest one application in second-language literacy education, that is, conscientizing practices in view of Paulo Freire (1970). Inclusive of these practices are (1) perceiving “oppressive elements of reality”, (2) changing one’s mindset (e.g. from corruption to integrity), and (3) actions leading to social change.
The first and second steps can be explored by immersing (English) language learners, at least at university level, in critical corpus linguistic analysis.
For example, the students are to examine collocations preceding or following the word “corrupt(ion)” (e.g. money laundering, bribery, officials, public institution, mindset, judicial taskforce, etc.) and “integrity” (e.g. professionalism, transparency, pact, moral, political, restore, credibility, etc.) displayed by means of a concordance software that can retrieve a huge collection of texts (i.e. a corpus of tens of thousands up to, in some cases, millions of words).
The corpus can be a specialized one compiled by teachers from downloadable texts containing cases of corruption and its eradication, like those in The Jakarta Post and fed into the concordance software.
After this analysis, students follow up the conscientization in writing projects by making connections between existing oppression attributable to corruption, committed by other people and themselves in the past, and their deliberate attempts to transcend corruption through a course of actions that reflect integrity and in turn defend themselves just like what the Javanese believe is becik ketitik ala ketara (time will tell who is right and wrong).
This character critical literacy education blueprint will with hope help eliminate rampant Gayus-like corrupt officials.
Sounds too hopelessly idealistic? Suspend your judgment and let’s give it a try!


The writer is a lecturer at the Satya Wacana Christian University’s School of Language and Literature, in Salatiga, Central Java.