Character Building, a Key for Recovering Indonesian Education System

Character Building, a key for recovering Indonesian education system

            Character is a core of deeds. It grows as a part of human’s behavior which overheads among all people. One of the ways to measure the nation’s culture and civilization is by looking at characters. Why does the writer say so?

“When wealth is lost, nothing is lost. When health is lost, something is lost. When character is lost, all is lost! “ – (Anonymous). We actually have heard about that word, it shows that character is the most important of all. In education, the character building for students’ behavior is the most important thing that should be applied. It is not just about the teachers’ role in school, but also how come their family and environment support it so that it can go along very well.

Let us see in our UUD 1945, it stated that one of the goals of Indonesia education is to increase and create a smart quality of life among people, “(or in bahasa: memajukan kesejahteraan umum dan mencerdaskan kehidupan bangsa). Smart quality is not only meant by smart intellectual, but also emotional and spiritual. If we are seeing the situation in Indonesian education, what happened? Are those three – aspects go well? Indonesian education just emphasizes on students’ intellectual or intelligence. It is a fact, not a spoof or jokes. There are many facts that show that our education is too focus on intelligence itself, e.g. in implementing National Examination (Ujian Nasional), there are some standard scores that should be gained by the students in order to pass the exam. It just makes the students feel, “How can I reach that ya buscores?”. It is good if our educational system have given a standard marks or passing grade, it can motivates them to study more diligently, but in other words, it also can makes them feel stressed and do whatever to reach it.

If we have understood about the situation above, where are the moral students that PKN’s teacher have taught in three years? He or she taught the honesty and morality, but in the end, is it useful when her or his students do cheating at examination?

In different case, if the institution failed in passing its’ students, it can destroy the reputation of school. One of the problems is, there is no idealism in students and teachers. Where is their idealism as a teacher which should make their students smart, not only graduate? If our education system makes young generations to be pragmatic, and does not emphasize on students good character building, there will be many bad people in this country. Corruptors, for example, betray their oath because they only want to achieve what they want, that is money. Actually, they took a high education, didn’t it? But what happened after? They did corruption, because they lost their characters.

This is the evidence that education should embrace character building of the students so they will not only be smart intellectually, but also emotionally and spiritually. Prophet Muhammad SAW had proven that Allah actually didn’t give knowledge at first, but good character or Akhlaqul Karimah, so he was famous with “Al – Amin” (a trusted person). Allah has given us in Al-Quran that the most important thing that should be taken that is Akhlaqul Karimah. To establish akhlaq, our education system must enclose character building programs.

How to implement the character building in school? Nowadays, teachers can write character building in their lesson plan sheet or RPP. It should be enclosed by characters education which represents the student’s behavior. Indeed, its not only at classroom application, but how does the RPP apply well.

Our education system emphasizes on our intellectual than our characters and religion building. In 2013 curriculum, the three aspects should ideally balance and fair. But, it about the teachers’ role, how to apply it? In 2013 curriculum, actually our government do aware of bad situation with previous curriculum, there was less character building on it.

As a conclusion, between teachers, parents and government are having well-responsibility on implementing characters on students behavior. Indeed, the students' internal factor that is to do the best things and avoid doing misbehave can become more successfully factor to empower the students' character building.