So does the existence of MBI Amanatul Ummah santri domiciled under the Welirang mountain on Mojokerto whom trademark is pen and heritage book, manage to successfully win the mathematics Olympiad and robotics competition at the ASEAN level. And there is a santri who won the international audition on Holy Qur’an recitation, and there are still a lot more achievements santri have achieved as time passed. These facts have just proof how unacceptable is the statement of pesantren as an out-of-date education culture.
We have been talking a lot about pesantren. You may already recognize some of the unique, extraordinary things that make it a great role model in education. Now, slightly, I want to talk more about santri. Santri has a lot of things in common with the typical students, those who do not spend their education time on pesantren. However, there is something significant that differ between santri and students in general.
The education model taught in pesantren emphasizes the value and knowledge transfer principle, which means not only transferring knowledge. But, also being responsible for the process and making sure how the process would create the santri to be well-being humankind through the knowledge he learnt and obtained something called religiosity.
The value and knowledge transfer principle convince santri to do everything based on Islamic – religious – morals, which is usually called akhlaqul karimah. This behaviour is successfully attached in their daily activities and successfully influence their capability on solving the problem in everyday life or – moreover – in competitions. This point allowed started to makes me think, “well, is it the very thing that makes them be a step further from the rest of the students in general?”.
Well, maybe it is. However, we can observe in the competitions that generally happens to everyone in the field that everybody is putting themselves on an outstanding level of struggle and effort to maintain the output they would expect successfully. This is a major common thing that will happen to the competition participants, either he is a santri or a student in general.
Everyone is maximizing their effort in every aspect to win the competition finals. However, there is an effort that santri will always maximize. Usually, students do not, which is the spiritual effort or so-called as their x-factor, hidden factor that unexpectedly succeeds them in a lot of events. The rate of how high santri would maximize their spiritual effort depends on how high their religiosity is.
The fact that they live in a society with a spiritual role model, such as a Kiai, seems to keep their religiosity increasing day by day flourishingly. Ultimately, religiosity is what created santri daily activity to be greatly meaningful to them. It successfully affected their mindset in almost every moment. So, any public and media mindset sometimes do not bother them so much. It has never been a problem for them, and the most urgent matter is that as the world gets older, santri credibility has never decreased. And positive social view toward santri as a a religious and full-of-achievement community of Indonesia should never end.