Introducing Good and Bad Virtues To Avoid Conflict In Javanese Society: A Study Case From Javanese Short Narrative For Children

Abstract

Narratives, fairy tales, and other forms of storytelling have been long used as one of the means to educate children about good and bad values accepted in the society. Javanese society was no exception. However, the big question is how these values are presented and taught to children. This study aims to explore various virtues and values, good and bad, taught through narrative story telling for children in Java. The stories are collected from the weekly magazine Djaka Lodang, and only stories with human as the actors and with human interaction are chosen. Data collected are in the forms of lexicon, that have meaning as good or bad virtues, such as jujur 'honest', rukun 'harmonious', andhap asor 'humble', bekti 'devoted', ngajeni 'appreciate (others)', ugungan 'selfish', tukaran 'dispute (with other)' by regarding the sentence's context so the function of introducing these virtues could be seen clearly. These data are then analyzed using the approach of linguistic anthropology and moral development and education theory. The result reveals that Javanese society taught, not only the good virtues, but also the bad ones. A virtue can have positive meaning if there is another virtue as a comparison in its polarity, for example 'honest' is a good virtue, because its opposite 'lie' exists as the bad virtue. Introducing virtues of both polarities are done with the same goal, that is to avoid conflict with other people within the society. This actually corresponds with the main concept of socializing in Javanese society, achieving a harmonious society.