Another wrath from the sky. The earlier one in December had cost me a lot already when my engine was flooded just five hundred meters from my abode. People predicted that the big flood would not surface in another 5 years. Wrong. It was right out of my doorstep, just another year from the last one. And to reach my doorsteps, trust me, it had to be very big. Sometimes I wonder, what have we done so wrong to receive these angers? Can we do anything –at all- to help fix the harms done in the past?
For sometimes now, my self and a good friend of mine, had been discussing about an alternative education system for our youngsters. As he is a father of a two-year old boy, he is going to have to make that decision faster than we would imagine. What type of education shall his son receive soon? Then he mentioned something wonderful. It wasn’t anything radical or brand new, in fact several foundations had already established the kind of methods we were talking about around the outskirts of Jakarta and Bandung. It is called sekolah alam or natural learning.
The objective of such school is to have an affordable education system with nature as its greatest learning source. As most major schools and especially international ones had been Americanized by air-condition installments, state of the art laboratories, expatriate educators, fancy teaching equipments, fantastic gymnasiums and even Rp. 50,000,- a meal cafeterias, we were trying to re-embrace the soul of the school foundation itself: Teaching and Learning.
Learning doesn’t have to be expensive. In those sekolah alam you may find no formal classrooms, only open air saung (huts) and some simple administrative buildings. Sometimes they would take the blackboard outside and gather-round under a canopying tree (very Jesus-like eh?). Or they would plant herbs and vegetables from seeds, grow fish and poultries, all for the consumptions of the school and the neighboring communities. They were taught to be dependent on nature, not from what’s available on the isles of the supermarket. With this they need to learn how to be creative, how to grow, how to save, and how to appreciate nature.
An interesting note came from a natural school in Ciganjur, South Jakarta:
“The kids are encouraged to freely explore his/ her surrounding. They are not forced to wear any uniform. Diversity in here is seen as a basic-right of any individual, in which needs to be acknowledged and respected. We are sure that the uniformity doesn’t have to be seen from what are they wearing, we would stress more consistency in their good wills, conducts, behaviors, and also their never-ending passion to learn and of course their curiosities”
I personally think that this is a very good step in re-acknowledging nature. Modern thinking and modern ways of life pampered us thus far. In fact in supporting our lifestyles, sometimes it was seen as “okay” to develop humanity while destroying our own natural resources. Look what happened lately.
Imagine that the earth is our own head and the trees and the grass that grew naturally is our own hair. And then we drill and suck the blood out of our head. And then we thrust concrete beams into the depth beneath our skulls. And then, we need to burn our own hair to create land openings for real estates. And imagine having head-lice that run freely, habit, and create their generations of families on top of our head. Wouldn’t you scratch your itches too? Would you shake your head in hope that all those lice will just fly away? Wouldn’t you go under the shower to wipe out all the bugs? I wouldn’t blame nature if it seemed to be so angry to us. A little bit of love may go along way for our future.
Ancient scriptures might clearly state that we as human beings have the rights to command all living things on earth. Just because it doesn’t qualify as neither animals, plants or human beings, sometimes we forgot that our planet is a living organism too. The air moves, the water runs, and the earth shakes. It needs to be acknowledged as we acknowledged other living things. It needs to be taken care too.
My friends, along with our rights, responsibilities also came with them.
Glad to be back,
Prof. Utonium
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