aspect, then human development will be unbalanced. Ki Hadjar Dewantara argued that
education that only emphasizes intellectual aspects will keep students away from society.
Unfortunately, education today only focuses on developing thinking skills, while paying less
attention to developing emotions and imagination. If continued, this will make humans lose
their humanity. From a socio-anthropological point of view, the uniqueness of humans
compared to other creatures is culture. Thus, one effective method to improve humanity is
through cultural development. However, culture has diversity in society. Ki Hadjar
Dewantara himself changed his name to reflect a change in educational approach, from satria
pinandita to pinandita satria. This reflects a shift in role from spiritual teacher to spiritual
teacher with a knightly spirit, ready to protect the country and the people. For Ki Hadjar
Dewantara, a teacher should have superior character and spirituality before becoming a hero
who guides students to become defenders of the country. In other words, the first role of an
educator is to be a good role model before functioning as a facilitator or teacher.
In analyzing a curriculum from a particular perspective, the first thing that needs to be
understood and distinguished is the components of the curriculum. The curriculum consists
of several components, namely objectives, content, methods/strategies, and evaluation.
Regarding objectives, based on the previous explanation, the main objective of the Merdeka
curriculum is to develop students' intellectual abilities, attitudes, and skills based on their
talents and interests. If we connect the objectives of the independent curriculum described
above with the definition of education according to Ki Hadjar Dewantara, the objectives of
the independent curriculum look too limited. This is due to its focus only on how learners can
self-actualize well, without paying attention to the aspects expressed by Ki Hadjar about the
importance of learners' understanding of community culture (Idris et al., 2023). Today, in an
era of rapid technological advancement, most individuals are affected by the significant
development of information technology. Many people are seduced by such advanced
technology, thus neglecting other important aspects of their lives. Things like strengthening
interpersonal relationships, participating in social activities in the community, valuing others
more than technological achievements, and so on.
Seeing what happened in the field and comments from one of the teachers, in its
implementation, this independent curriculum did not have any influence in changing the
progress of education, in the case of teachers continuing to teach in the same way, the same
model, the same practices, and ordered by the same principal. The training conducted in the
independent curriculum which lasted for 3 (three) days, 7 (seven) days, or more than 1 (one
week) did not study what the independent curriculum was at all, but all teachers in the
training learned about teaching administration. The teacher's competence is copying teaching
administration on the internet. 4 (four) teacher competencies, namely pedagogic, personality,
professional, and social, all of these will not be scrutinized, or examined by the principal.
However, what is checked is the teaching administration. Naming related to lesson plans
alone is renamed, syllabus too, and other technician terms are replaced. This means that
teacher competence is TU competence, where teachers leave the classroom to complete the
administration so that teachers are considered the best if they complete teaching
administration. These policies do not have a clear and rational concept.
Although Nadiem Makarim's Merdeka Curriculum emphasizes student freedom and
creativity, there are some aspects that may conflict with Ki Hadjar Dewantara's concept of