Seeing the breath of education and feeling the soul of an institution called a school
I have always been partial to international literature because reading it opens my mind and my eyes to things different from what I see in my everyday world. A friend of mine on Facebook recommended this book by an Indonesian author, Andrea Hirata, and I was surprised by how popular he is (this book alone has more than 25,000 ratings averaging higher than 4) when I looked him up on Goodreads.
I have always been partial to international literature because reading it opens my mind and my eyes to things different from what I see in my everyday world. A friend of mine on Facebook recommended this book by an Indonesian author, Andrea Hirata, and I was surprised by how popular he is (this book alone has more than 25,000 ratings averaging higher than 4) when I looked him up on Goodreads.
The story is Hirata’s autobiographical debut novel focusing on education of the poorest of the poor Indonesian school children on an island in a very small, very rural, mostly volunteer school in the tin mining region north of Jakarta in the Java Sea. It’s the story of an extraordinary education given to a group of children by two of the most dedicated teachers in their country.
This tiny, impoverished school is also fundamentally religious, which is told by this proverb, which hung on their flagpole: “Do what is good and prevent what is evil.” It was the primary principle of Muhammadiyah, the second largest Islamic organization in Indonesia, with more than thirty million members.
Their lessons were wide ranging, but the essence comes down to teaching the spirit of giving as much as possible, not taking as much as possible.
In a country where we are taught early to value ourselves, our futures, and our fellow citizens largely by the amount of money (we think) they make or the amount of visible material wealth they have (purchased or borrowed money to buy), this is an eye opening lesson.