This is what I can say about students brawls..

No, I’m not going to just judge them because everyone has done that. What I want to convey is that we, these-persons-people-say-as educated people, have to see this problem from every aspect of it, because I think judgment is not very beneficial.

Let’s see this first by their reason to do that. According to an article in The Jakarta Post newspaper  I’ve just read, some students said that it’s more about pride than rivalry. They want to show others that they come from this particular school, they want to be known, they want they school to be distinguished and feared by others. Some students even didn’t know the persons they attacked. Moreover, some rivalry-caused-brawls only include several students, not almost the whole students of the school.

The second is to see this as a problem only happened in Indonesia is quite wrong I think. I’ve googled some student brawls around Asia and found one happened in Bangkok and occurred in a bus, which even killed an innocent  passenger. I also found some in Malaysia, Philippines and others. So, since it has become more than a national problem, I think at least each country’s representatives can discuss it together in order to find a better solution.

The third is how we can solve or at least decrease this problem. I’m not an psychologist, I’m just a freshly-high-school-graduate so maybe you can’t compare my ‘solution’ to what the psychologists say. So here is what I can say. We need to create a better environment for each students. By ‘we’ I mean not just the school, but also their parents, religious scope, even the country and the students themselves. How they can cooperate with each other? Trust the students, love them. Some parents are too afraid of what their children can do so they can’t trust their children without realizing that trust is one of the most important thing the teenager need to achieve. By not being trusted by the society, the students feel the urge to prove something, sometimes, pitifully by violating others.

We also have to admit that media has a huge role to this, especially social media. That’s why everyone has to be equipped by an awareness of how dangerous media is, if they can’t utilize it wisely. It’s need to be concerned at because nowadays media affects people negatively more than positively.

The last thing is use the law. Some students brawls happened because the students thought there won’t be any serious punishment since Indonesian law enforcements are easily bribed. The country has to prove its integrity towards its people or everything will get worse as the time goes by.

Okay I promise it will really be the last, but I found an interesting opinion on Indonesian students by Pandji Pragiwaksono (http://pandji.com/gimana-tuh-jawaban-saya-keren-ga/) . It is written in Indonesian so I’ll do my best to translate a snippet of it.

“for every 300 students brawling on the street, there are 30.000 students who are studying, exploring their competencies, thinking and creating something. The media has never met them because the students are in their schools environment. It  barely puts them on the headlines because a news about those studying students are not eye catching enough compared to the news about the brawling students. Every time I met people who said the quality of Indonesian students is getting worse, I’m sure they have to change what they read and watch.”