Nurfika Osman – A worrying rise in sectarian and religious conflicts around the country could be traced back to the poor implementation of civic education in schools, experts said on Tuesday.

Retno Listyarti, from the Jakarta Teachers Consensus Forum (FMGJ), said textbooks required by the government only defined the nationalist ideology of Pancasila without going into how the values it encompassed could be put into practice.

"This has given rise to hostility between people of different religions and ethnicities, a tendency for people to resolve problems through violence and a loss of work ethic," she said. "It has created younger generations without character."

Retno said the most important part about teaching students about civics was the promotion of multiculturalism. "But the civic education being offered now has failed to promote multiculturalism, which is essentially part of Pancasila," she said.

According to Retno, a survey in February by the FMGJ and Paramadina University's Institute for Education Reform showed none of the country's prescribed school textbooks contained the word "multiculturalism."

"Not a single book out of the 21 texts that are used in schools contains a word that is so important to a country like Indonesia," she said.

The low quality of civic education has also led to many teachers having a poor understanding of the values of diversity and pluralism, Retno said.

"Sadly, two of 23 civic education teachers who participated in a two-week training course that we held rejected the idea of teaching multiculturalism at their schools," she said.

"They [incorrectly] argued that it went against Pancasila, that it was secular and that they found it inappropriate," she said. " Reasons like those are bizarre."

Retno said the teachers in error were from state elementary schools in Jakarta. Utomo Dananjaya, an education expert from Paramadina University, said teachers should be specifically trained to teach students about nationalism and civic values.

"Pancasila, multiculturalism and all these issues shouldn't be memorized so that the students can write down their definitions by heart later on," he said.

"It should be about getting them to experience and practice these values in their daily lives. Teachers need to stop using monotonous methods like lecturing to get the lessons across to the students."