The Turkish education system and the official ideology
by
MÜMTAZ’ER TÜRKÖNE

The quality of education

Let's list in our minds everything we do in the name of education. The sacrifices made for our children, the expenses paid for renovating thousands of school buildings, salaries paid to thousands of teachers, the money we pay to private teaching institutions found on every corner of every street, the way we put up with school transportation services that block traffic and, most importantly, the hopes we have not only as individuals but as a nation. But the return for all of this is close to nil. When we add up what our efforts, sacrifices and use of limited resources yield, the result is a huge “nothing.”

The results of the ÖSS and Level Determination Examination (SBS) announced last week explain the reason for this huge “nothing.”

Like the way author Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar lampooned bureaucracy in his novel “The Time Regulation Institute” (Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü), all our educational institutions are just clock regulators. We are facing a disastrous scenario. We must see this scenario as Turkey's most pressing, most painful and most serious problem. The Turkish education system is in ruins, and not only our children and youth but our entire future, in other words each one of us, is under these ruins.

More than half the students who took the exam could not answer even one of the 30 science questions. The average correct response was four out of 30. The scores in other fields were not much better. On average, students could not respond correctly to more than five of 10 social science questions. In mathematics, the average dropped to just three correct answers for every 10 questions. Again the situation was not any better with the SBS. The real scenario is worse than these figures.

For many years, I have taught lessons to students who have scored very high on the university entrance exam. They are all very intelligent and talented kids, but they don't know how to work with abstract concepts. They can't move from fragments to the whole. It is very rare to find young people that can recite a few verses of a poem other than the national anthem and the “Onuncu Yıl” march. It's very difficult for a person that hasn't memorized a poem to understand the rhythm and opportunities of his mother tongue and consequently understand what he reads and writes. It's uncommon to come across a student who reads classic foreign or Turkish novels. A college student that hasn't read classic books is far from having a universal background.

To illustrate the defectiveness of the system, I will offer an example from foreign language classes. Foreign language education should teach a student how to speak, understand and write a different language. Am I correct? The majority of the youth have been learning a foreign language since primary school. Among them, there are also students that have taken one-year English language preparation classes at Anatolian high schools. But even when they reach college, they still can't provide directions to a tourist. Another year of English language preparation in college doesn't improve the situation either. So who is doing what wrong?

Our education system is not concerned with preparing our youth for the real world. It's only concerned with preparing them for exams. We have a system marked by exams. Only information that has the potential to be asked on an exam is taught to students. If a piece of information cannot become a question on a multiple-choice exam sheet, then it is considered unimportant. It is for this reason that students learn how to answer grammar questions instead of actually learning how to speak English.

Official education

Education is a complicated issue in every part of the world. In Turkey, however, the youth are being overwhelmed not only by universal problems but also additional problems. For us, education is not only a mechanism to teach knowledge and skills to the youth. For close two decades, we have been trying to close the gap between Turkey and the West through education. It is for this reason that education has been placed in a magical world. With the founding of the Republic of Turkey, education became the main carrier of the nation-state project. Patriotic education became a component of the learning system in every part of the world. But in Turkey, it became the education system itself.

The first thing inspectors from the Education Ministry or from provincial national education directorates make a note of when they walk through the doors of a school is that a statue of Atatürk is located across the entrance, the 10 paragraphs of the national anthem are posted on the wall to the right and Atatürk's address to the youth is posted on the left in compliance with official standards.

Looking into the content and quality of the education is not a matter of interest.

What if a study were conducted in rural parts of Turkey? What if chemistry teachers were asked to explain what they know about the new discoveries that have been made in chemistry since they graduated from college? What if a literature teacher were asked which literary works she had read? What if it were explained to a music teacher that her job wasn't to teach children how to sing songs but to develop a sense of appreciation in the students for music? What if we looked at these issues in private educational institutions as well? In addition to a “Time Regulation Institute” and its workers, what other discoveries would we make?

These problems are not the kinds of problems that can be resolved by policies developed by our sophisticated national education minister, or even our government, for that matter, just like how the YÖK president cannot resolve the futility of a higher education system oriented toward overspecialization.

Several years ago I asked a public relations professor who argued that the public relations department located in a communications faculty needed to be separated what this department offered students other than a two-month course on public relations. I got no response. College students need to know all this. Around 85 percent of college graduates find jobs that are not related to their major. The majority of the remaining 15 percent are doctors and teachers.

Unlike structural problems in education in other parts of the world, in Turkey we have a “vocational education” problem. The vocational education problem is the reason our education system is disconnected from the real world and why it does not meet the needs of the market, among many other bad situations. But it is the military tutelage system that creates this problem. An entire education system was impaired just to be able to prevent students going to imam-hatip schools, classified as vocational schools, from advancing up the educational ladder.

The rate of vocational education is 70 percent globally. These schools teach skills that are needed in the market. But in Turkey, this rate is very low. The reason for this is that students who choose to go to vocational schools have a very low, if any, chance of continuing on to higher education because of the lower coefficient used to calculate the ÖSS scores of vocational school graduates. If students had the opportunity to move on to higher education from vocational education, many students would opt to go to vocational schools. But today, many students go to regular high schools because they don't want to miss out on going to college. Many young people who don't have suitable jobs line up in front of universities. This accumulation encourages an entrance exam-oriented education and private tutoring system. Students in regular high schools don't find any opportunity to prepare for real life. While the economy cannot find the qualified workers it needs, the youth, parents, teachers and the country are being overwhelmed by a testing-oriented education system. It is the coefficient system, which makes going to vocational high schools disadvantageous, that is behind this failure.

A change to the coefficient system as announced by the YÖK president has the potential to completely restructure the education system. This is the key to the problem. This step should be boldly taken, and to make vocational education appealing, the path of graduates of vocational high schools should be opened.