Indonesian Representatives, Lie to Me No More

By Yohanes Sulaiman & Weilin Han on 08:23 pm Apr 07, 2014

A while ago there was a TV series called “Lie to Me” where the main character, Dr. Cal Lightman (Tim Roth), was a psychologist helping law enforcement agents to analyze a suspect’s face and body movements to determine whether he or she was telling the truth.

Ahead of this year’s elections, hosts of TV programs and talkshows in Indonesia are suddenly turning into amateur psychologists. Walking in Lightman’s footsteps, they are analyzing people in similar ways, inviting experts to help reading gestures of various electoral candidates, interpreting and adding meanings, giving seals of approval and disapproval.

Those who felt threatened and humiliated by such analyses responded by claiming that the television hosts were campaigning against them. At the same time, those who were praised in the shows are using the analyses as marketing tools for self-promotion: to show what great candidates they are.

By the end of the day though, these analyses have no objective value. It’s pure entertainment. There is very little correlation between how candidates make gestures and whether they will perform well once they are elected (if that’s the case, then psychopaths would be the best presidents).

On the other hand, there is another familiar way to determine whether a candidate will do as he or she says. It is called a track record. The candidate has to prove what they have done and how they manage conflicts. He is expected to give evidence of his performance, and not what he wishes he had done. An academic CV and list of previous positions may be important as a gauge of a person’s qualifications, but they are less important than experience in actually getting something done.

To some degree though, it is possible to combine both Lightman’s method and actual track records during this year of campaigning. By this we mean that we are taking scores of candidates’ past promises and gestures and see if they keep those promises.

For instance, one promise that often comes up during the campaign is that education will be improved.

“I promise that education should be free and accessible for everyone,” “we have to increase our education quality,” “we will pay attention to the teacher’s welfare” — and many other promises are blurted out in order to garner votes. In reality, though, while officially education is free, people are still saddled with various fees: study trips fees, uniform fees, donations, etcetera.

Moreover, records show that in the last two years, our Education Ministry made many promises, only to break them: look at Kurikulum 2013-gate (K13). The ministry boasted that this curriculum was the only savior for our education system — just like an advertising quack with tales of countless cures to every imaginable disease.

Let us refresh your memory on the broken promises surrounding K13. During the K13 socialization process, it was said that the state would bear the costs for production and dissemination of the books, teachers would be very happy because they did not have to spend a lot of time developing lesson plans and assessments. And since K13 was a progressive curriculum, the state would also provide a new format of the report card, which would show the student’s capacity holistically.

Grade-10 students would take cross-stream subjects that they like instead of following a rigid schedule. The school would use their past report cards and psychological test to make decisions. K13 training would only be carried out by certified and qualified trainers who master the concepts. The list goes on and on.

Let us be fooled no more. In reality it is all business as usual. The original “free books” was just a teaser. Schools must purchase K13 books now. Available lesson plans (which are very poorly written) were samples and teachers in the end had to create their own lesson plans. At the same time, the problem is that most teachers don’t have any clue about how to create their own K13-based lesson plans because not only were trainings limited, the trainers also were not briefed and prepared ahead of time.

Report cards? Schools must be creative, right? So, be as creative as you like. Choosing your cross-stream subjects? The guideline provided during the training officially mentioned that the students could do that only in Grade 11 — and not 10 as boasted. Some schools obediently follow the former instruction and some follow the latter. Monitoring, who cares?

In the end, talk is cheap and people should keep the old adage in mind: Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

We have learned the hard way that those who made promises turned out luring us into muddier and murkier conditions — and, to make matters worse, they used our tax money to do so.

We should now use the limited time available to learn about the track records of candidates. Obviously, we can always just shrug, believing there is no use in voting. Or, we can think that they are all liars anyway. But are you sure you want to lose your chance? Have we not learned to reject stiff-necked crooks?

We use our time to learn about candidates, because we don’t want to have ravening wolves in sheep’s clothing representing us.

Yohanes Sulaiman is a lecturer at the Indonesian Defense University (Unhan).
Weilin Han is a teacher-trainer and school consultant.