Digital Literacy and Character Formation in Indonesian Schools: Rethinking the Pancasila Learner Profile
Keywords:
character education, critical pedagogy, digital literacy, lateral reading, Pancasila Learner ProfileAbstract
Indonesian education policy pursues character strengthening and digital literacy as parallel programmes, yet digital environments have become a principal site of moral formation, making their separation a significant source of implementation weakness. This study aims to examine how Indonesian policy instruments construct the relationship between digital environments and moral formation, to identify what research establishes about the mechanisms through which such environments shape belief and disposition, and to formulate an integrated pedagogical design. The research applies qualitative document analysis with a critical policy orientation, examining the National Education System Law, the Child Protection Law, the Personal Data Protection Law, presidential regulation on character education, curriculum regulation, and ministerial regulation on violence in educational units, read against scholarship in media education, information evaluation, adolescent development, and platform political economy. The findings show that the corpus is dominated by protective and operational orientations while the critical orientation, conceptually present in the critical reasoning dimension of the Pancasila Learner Profile, lacks implementing instruments; that operational fluency does not produce evaluative judgement, since students read vertically while expert evaluators read laterally; and that credibility checklists widely used in Indonesian materials train the behaviour that produces error. The article recommends embedding critical evaluation within subject teaching, replacing checklists with taught verification procedures, using media production as analysis, aligning institutional ethos with the explicit programme, and treating school data governance under the Personal Data Protection Law as pedagogical practice.
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