Scout Polemic Becomes Voluntary, Minister Of Education And Technology Nadiem Asked To Sit With Kwarnas

JATENG - Academic of Muhammadiyah University Purwokerto (UMP) Elly Hasan Sadeli advised the Minister of Education, Culture, Research and Technology (Mendikbudristek) Nadiem Makarim to sit with relevant stakeholders in making policy changes in the world of education.

According to him, Nadiem should have invited the National Kwartir (Kwarnas) of the Scout Movement in discussing the Scout extracurricular which is now a polemic.

"Actually, the pros and cons of one policy must exist, including one of them is the change in the position of Scout extracurricular from being voluntary. I don't mind whether it is mandatory or voluntary," said the Dean of the UMP Faculty of Teachers and Education (FKIP) in Purwokerto, Central Java, Wednesday.

In this case, he said, the changes were regulated through the Minister of Education and Culture Regulation Number 12 of 2024 as a substitute for Permendikbud Number 63 of 2014 which made extracurricular scout mandatory.

However, he sees that scout activities must also be evaluated if their position as mandatory extracurricular or material is given has a major impact on character formation and so on.

According to him, this can be seen from conventional scout activities and physical exercises that tend to slightly lead to the military.

If scouters are too forced to become mandatory extracurricular, he said, it means discriminating other extracurricular things such as sports and art.

"Even though the name is extra, actually in fiqh it's additional or sunnah. For me, I really agree with this change of position," he said.

However, the government also needs to pay attention to whether the change in position from mandatory to voluntary has gone through a holistic study, he said, not to be partial because of the importance of changing the 2013 curriculum to the Independent Curriculum.

Furthermore, Elly said that the material for character formation was also in the activity of the Pancasila Student Profile Strengthening Project (P5).

"So actually the government did not later abolish the scout, not really, only a change in position from being obliged to being voluntary. In the past, it was mandatory, meaning that there were measuring tools, evaluations, and everything was linked later to intracurricular," he said.

Sementara sekarang, kata dia, extracurricular scout menjadi pilihan, sehingga tidak menjadi persoalan jika siswa memilih atau tidak memilihnya. Ia mengakui jika di sekolah-sekolah pribadi atau swasta tidak menutup kemungkinan ada yang tidak menyelenggarakan extracturikel Pramuka.

In fact, he continued, in Muhammadiyah there was also a leadership activity in the form of Hezbul Wathan (HW) who also supported character formation.

Regarding the evaluation of Scout activities, he said it was done to find out if it really had a significant impact on the formation of student characters.

According to him, the evaluation needs to be carried out on points or activities that are deemed not optimal or less than optimal.

"I did not then degrade that the scout had no impact, it must have an impact because indeed we have seen the results. Only indeed, whether the results are significant or not, of course we have to look at it comprehensively whether it really needs to be improved to certain aspects of Scout activities," he said.

Therefore, he said, the government, in this case the Minister of Education and Technology, must sit together with scout activists, especially the Kwarnas of the Scout Movement to discuss the extracurricular polemic in order to provide a clear understanding for scout activists.

He believes the pros and cons related to the change in scout extracurricular positions will be prolonged if the government and scout activists do not meet soon.