Either/Or

Have you seen the movie "Mona Lisa Smile"? It’s great isn’t it? I’ve just watched it a few weeks ago from pirated DVD. I thought everything about the movie was great. The acts, the story, and all about it. It wasn’t in vain that the producer(s) put big names such as Julia Roberts and Kirsten Dunst in that movie.

What interested me the most was the scenes in the classroom. I was mesmerized by the bravery and straightforwardness of the students. I admired how they have read the entire text on art history, hence enabling them to understand everything that Ms. Watson (Julia Roberts’s character) taught and was about to teach. The students didn’t seem like they needed any lecture on art history. They looked like they’ve mastered the subject already. But of course Ms. Watson eventually managed to turn the table 180 when she changed her teaching style and the syllabus.

To me, Ms. Watson’s art history class is the ideal class. Every class, starting from classes in senior high schools to classes in graduate schools should have Ms. watson’s class as their model. It’s very urgent, especially in Indonesia, to have classes where both the students and the lecturers are straightforward, critical, diligent, and dedicated to the subjects themselves.

Most classes in Indonesian educational institutions suck, at least I presume. The students were passive (I was passive as well sometimes) and, even worse, the lecturers sometimes don’t even have adequate mastery of the subject he/she teaches. Both contributed to the lack of knowledge of the students.

The ineloquency of their speeches, their timidity, their laziness, and their orientation towards grades instead of knowledge, all contributed to the slow development of Indonesians. The act of the lecturers and students must be revolutionised, we need to model ourselves, as students and lecturers, and our classes to that which is depicted in the "Mona Lisa Smile" movie, or else the Indonesians will be doomed to stupidity and slavery, worse than we already are now.