Pendidikan Sebagai Instrumen Rekognisi Hukum Adat dan Hukum Agama dalam Sistem Hukum Nasional: Tinjauan Normatif

Abstract

Education serves a frequently overlooked function in the recognition of customary law and religious law within Indonesia's national legal system. Despite the constitutional mandate of Article 18B paragraph (2) of the 1945 Constitution, which obliges the state to recognize and respect customary law communities, the question of how this recognition is institutionalized remains unresolved. This article examines, from a normative perspective, the theoretical foundations, institutional practices, and inherent limits of education as an instrument of recognition. Employing normative legal research with a qualitative approach, this study finds that the teaching of customary law in Indonesian law schools remains dominated by a "sterile knowledge" paradigm that presents adat as a static normative system detached from social reality, obscuring its dynamic character within legal pluralism. Religious law education faces a recognition monopoly—Law No. 1/PNPS/1965 limits recognized religions to six, thereby excluding local religions and their customary legal systems from state recognition. Analysis of the MAANGo institution in Aceh Gayo and the Kampung Urug community demonstrates that education does, in fact, perform a recognition function, yet its effectiveness depends on the degree of compatibility between educational content and the self-reproduction mechanisms of local normative orders. This article concludes that education as an instrument of recognition requires three conditions: non-standardization of content, compatibility of form with self-reproduction, and institutional awareness of legal pluralism. Genuine recognition demands a shift from education as a "transmitter of state-recognized norms" toward "recognition of the plurality of normative orders itself."