Multicultural Education in Indonesia

My students have different backgrounds. This background varies, ranging from social background, cultural background, and intelligence background.

In terms of social background, I see there are three social classes in my classroom. The first social class is the upper level, then the middle social class, and the lower social class. These students just hang out in accordance with the degree of their social class. This is not good!

So also with the cultural differences in my class, although my students are dominated by the tribe of Aceh, but there are also some who come from Batak and Java tribes. However, at a different level of intelligence, as a teacher does not necessarily favor the student with high intelligence. Because I saw, some teachers just like to teach smart students, while the students are low intelligence level, teachers appear less notice.

Then, what education is appropriate to the situation?

The answer is multicultural education. According to this source, multicultural education refers to any form of education or teaching that incorporates the histories, texts, values, beliefs, and perspectives of people from different cultural backgrounds. At the classroom level, for example, teachers may modify or incorporate lessons to reflect the cultural diversity of the students in a particular class. Multicultural education has several orientations, among them are humanity, togetherness, prosperity, professional, acknowledge plurality and heterogeneity, and anti-hegemony and anti-domination.

In Indonesia, multicultural education is one of the right choices. We know, Indonesia has a diversity of customs, cultures, tribes, and different languages in each region. Thus, the concept of multiculturalism education is essentially the emphasis of internalization efforts and the characterization of tolerance toward differences in religion, ethnicity, customs, etc. in the classroom.

Practices on multicultural education in schools in Indonesia should be done. Indonesia is still not free from threats of ethnic and religious conflict, radicalism, separatism, terrorism and disintegration of the nation.

Here, we see a concept of multicultural education that can be an alternative means of solving social conflict. In addition, this education can also guide our students to better understand local culture globally. And most important of this concept is to create Indonesia as a multicultural society.

@teukumukhlis