According to the latest survey by pollster Cyrus Indonesia, only 70 percent of Indonesians accept Pancasila as the country’s ideology and a unifying viewpoint for all citizens.
The survey, conducted among 1,230 randomly selected respondents across Indonesia, found that nearly 5 percent of respondents said they wanted a caliphate and 13 percent wanted the country to implement Islamic law.
In response to similar findings last year, the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR) gave its endorsement to a plan by the Ministry of Education and Culture to reactivate Pancasila Moral Education (PMP) courses in schools.
MPR Speaker Zulkifli Hasan said that it would revive the values of Pancasila as the state ideology and that students have lost the benefits of the Pancasila lessons and the Guidelines for the Internalisation and Manifestation of Pancasila (P4) which were taught during the era of former president Suharto’s New Order dictatorship.
The PMP was a study course taught in schools since 1975 and replaced the citizenship educational courses which had been part of the school curriculum in since 1968.
The PMP courses however were again changed in 1994 to become Pancasila and Citizenship Education (PPKn) and following the fall of Suharto in 1998 became PKn, losing the word Pancasila, which was seen as a product of the New Order.