Indonesia's 'Necro-Curriculum': Education System Criticized for Stifling Intellectual Life

A stark image of a modern classroom, students silently copying from screens, eyes fixed on laptops, paints a picture of physical presence but intellectual absence. This scenario is described as a "necro-curriculum," where education functions not to foster thought but to preserve intellectual "corpses."

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Imagine a 'perfect' classroom in the modern era: students sit neatly without a sound, their fingers busy copying text from a gadget screen, staring at a laptop while uploading administrative documents. No interruptions, no heated debates, let alone laughter within it. Everything is quiet, obedient, and orderly. On paper, this class is a great success. But sociologically, this scene resembles a mass burial chamber. The class appears physically alive, but essentially dead. Welcome to the era of the Necro-Curriculum, a condition where the education system no longer functions to cultivate thinking life, but acts like a formalin laboratory tasked with preserving the intellectual corpses of the younger generation.

The term "necro" draws from Achille Mbembe's theory of necropolitics, where power determines who lives and dies. In education, the curriculum wields this power, deciding which knowledge is "alive" and which must be "killed." Natural curiosity and critical thinking are suppressed as inefficient and difficult to quantify by standardized metrics. Instead, students are fed rigid learning targets, instant memorization for exams, and uniform project assignments, becoming "numb" to the meaning of knowledge as long as their academic records appear healthy.

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Our curriculum today is slowly killing students' natural curiosity and contextual critical reasoning because it is considered inefficient and difficult to measure by numerical standardization. Lessons are no longer designed to answer students' life anxieties in their surrounding environment. Instead, the curriculum injects 'formalin' in the form of rigid learning achievement targets, instant memorization for exams, and a series of uniform project assignments.

This intellectual "murder" persists due to an acute digital formalism. Sociologist Max Weber's warning about the "iron cage" of rational-legal bureaucracy is echoed in today's performance assessment apps, statistical dashboards, and online training certificates. Educators' energy is drained by administrative "face-polishing" for state control systems, leaving little time for student engagement or innovative teaching methods. Consequently, schools become mere exhibition spaces, akin to museum curators of mummies, where the appearance of activity masks a lack of genuine intellectual life.

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Today, that iron cage manifests in the form of performance assessment applications, statistical dashboards, and demands for online training certificates. Teachers no longer have time to listen to students' complaints or design lively experimental methods. Educators' energy is drained to polish the 'face' of school bureaucracy to appear active in the eyes of the state's control system.