One of the happiest moments during my time teaching in a primary school was when I looked at my students and their eyes bright with interest and enthusiasm in learning. I think that kind of passion in very rewarding for educators because they know that what students learn is going to be meaningful for the students. However, it may not happen a lot in schools these days. I saw students complain about the school, how it makes them bored, how the subjects they learn are useless, and how they want to get out of it as soon as possible. They do not feel, as Pranoto (2012) called, the experience of being in love with learning.

Then, I saw a talk by Robinson (2012) who mentioned that children nowadays are being robbed by the education system. They lost their excitement in learning. How come? I think humans have brains to think and to learn. It almost seems like students nowadays are robots who do what they are told, do not do what they are not told or what they are prohibited to, and feel no emotion during their learning process. People should feel something during the process of learning because they experience cognitive dissonance (Piaget, 1929) which makes people uncomfortable about their state of mind and therefore seek for equilibrium. This may explain why humans are naturally curious and motivated to seek for more.

Probably the reason of people’s disinterest in learning is that because learning, mostly related to an institution called school, instead of coming through personal interest, becomes the commodity of external forces, such as parents, teachers, and even governments. There is no more personal value put into education and learning. It is just something you do because you have to and you have no other choice. It seems, at least for me, that students now have a robotic tendency. They are controlled by others, have some kind of “intelligence” to “operate” but still, have no free will. No free will means no human, no?

The prison called school, invented by the education system makes those students, the ones in touch with education, those who experience education, devalue it. Education has no personal value anymore. What’s in it for students here and now, then? I can imagine how a student in remote area who has never seen airplane need to learn to count the speed of an airplane. It just does not make any sense. Yes, this is the era of global information when everyone can access everything from everywhere theoretically, but not in reality. The reality is curriculum used in education is irrelevant for students’ closest environment, to the present situation now as in 1973 when Freire suggested it. The content of education does not give people the ability to meet individual and local needs (Colin, 2011).

Education, despite of its purpose for global society, is about human. The priority should not be the benefit for the society first, but for the people educated first; as if the emergency situation in airplane requires people to help themselves first before helping others. Education needs to trigger sparks in people. People need to feel that it is worthwhile (Gingell & Winch, 2008). In order to do that, what is learned needs to be meaningful for them, connected to reality. Education, the content and process of it needs to be loveable so that people are in love with it.

May 28, 2013