Religion of Java (414) (1976) by Geertz Clifford

Author:Geertz, Clifford
Language: eng
Format: epub

A dedication of 11 per cent of the curriculum to religious subjects (counting Arabic as a “religious subject”)—and that largely to generalized “moral instruction”*—is a far cry, not only from the 80 per cent emphasis in the NU schools on technical religious subjects, but even from the 40 per cent in the “modern” BPPI. This difference is not due to the fact that this is a high school rather than an elementary school (although the fact that Muham-

* When I asked the boy who taught this for some examples of the instruction he imparted, he gave such maxims as “Don’t drink while standing up” and “Never enter anyone else’s house without first receiving permission.” He also teaches the moral significance of selected Koranic passages and hadilhs.

madijah-has far more high schools in Java than either NU or PSII is itself indicative of the greater strength of the school idea within their group). The relative emphasis of the various education systems remains about constant at each school level.

The whole organization of the school testifies to the distance between it and both the pondo/c and the madrasah. Six of the teachers are full-time and can live moderately well on their salaries of Rp 200 to Rp 275 a month, especially as they are furnished free quarters either in Muhammadijah homes or in empty houses owned by the richest member of the organization, a storekeeper. Tuition for the nearly 200 students is Rp 10 a month, and Muhammadijah donates Rp 600 a month toward the budget. Six of the teachers have diplomas from senior high schools or above, and the rest either from an advanced religious school or a junior high school. Success in passing the government entrance examination for senior high school have steadily increased since the school was founded after the war; and in fact the student body managed to startle almost the entire Modjolcuto populace in 1954 by having the best record in the examination of the three private junior high schools in town, although the other two had been generally considered to be academically superior. (Before the war, Muhammadijah had only an elementary school.)

Unlike the NU system, Muhammadijah’s school system is patterned exactly after the government school system. Their effort has been not to set up a self-consistent Islamic school system complete in itself, but rather to organize a private system which will parallel the national system and be able to take advantage of it. An example was the founding of a new teachers’ school by Muhammadijah, during the time I was in Modjolcuto. The lower normal school (i.e., one which trains teachers for elementary schools) in the national system is the same as the junior high school except that the normal school is four years long instead of three, the extra time being needed for education courses. As there was a severe shortage of places in the government normal schools, Muhammadijah opened a lower normal school of its own, consisting only of the fourth year—i.e., mainly education courses—and admitted graduates from the junior high schools.

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