Redefining Multicultural Education

The article has title “Redefining Multicultural Education”, it is an interesting and informative article because the author has tried to show us the difficult problem that our country face nowadays in different way, he explains all things about pluralism as our power and the way to increase our sensitivity to cultural pluralism. The article talks about Indonesia are a multicultural, multilingual, and multi religious society, it would be a boomerang for us, and pluralistic society will have problems and conflicts. Education is a method to solve the problems and conflicts which happen now, we can be aware of our pluralistic society through the right education policy.
I think actually the content of the article is about the sins of Suharto’s regime that have destroyed all part of our life and make us forget our identity as a plural country. We were forced to submit to a higher authority and make all things are one, we did not respect to diversity (culture, opinion, etc). I am very interested in the statement of the author that said social justice for all Indonesians (one of the fifth principle of Pancasila) was not understood by the past government (Suharto’s regime). I think that is the reason of all problems that happen, there is no justice and make the citizen be antipathy each other. Education and politic are a central part of our government to increase the prosperity unfortunately have many complex problems. I am going to try to elaborate my opinion about these are as follows.
Education as a means to educate the citizen has many problems that can make the goal of education cannot be realized, let us see from the education policy “local content” as the government’s attempt to accommodate the tradition of the people but I think it will make us do not understand about cultural beliefs, values and attitudes of different ethnic groups in our country. Our pluralistic awareness will fade and probably can make us lose our identity as a nation that has catchword “unity in diversity”, that is why there are many conflicts inter ethnic groups. The problems can be solved through multicultural education because education has function as nurturing and practicing pluralistic thoughts.
Because of Suharto’s regime, I think the big destruction of national character has attacked violently on our bureaucracy and governance. Nowadays, there is degradation morality of our governance that would have been public mistrust of the government, and suspicion of the armed forces. The bureaucracy did not realize that people’s conscience, self esteem and pride were hurt, resulting in a loss of trust in the government, they just think about how they get a lot of money from the project of government. Multicultural education can use to change and come up their character, when multicultural education has been their mind. The government will think to realize the prosperity and respect each other, do not see from the cultural or ethnic background.
As said before, through the multicultural education we can change the condition of communicating and interacting each other and widely for the government can grow our awareness to respect to all Indonesians, we have to know that we are standing under one motherland “Indonesia” and pluralistic society is uniting the Indonesian’s differences.