When will Turkey become a world power?
by İhsan İkizer*

Then, gradually, your company began to rebuild itself out of the ashes and you began to dream of once again being a powerful company in the business world. What kind of feelings would you experience in such a situation? Your pride would probably be rapidly reinvigorated, but you might also run the risk of letting excessive pride prevent you from making sensible decisions and seeing the truth.

My fear is that the history of Turkey looks like that of the hypothetical businessman I have described. After being one of the major powers on three continents, the Ottoman Empire became the sick man of Europe. Now, the sick man is recovering. As Turkey felt a real sense of injury about its treatment at the hands of European powers, it has now a tendency to exaggerate every success, particularly regarding the economy. However, some of these successes may be temporary and conjunctural, perhaps even coincidental. The fact that Turkey has a high economic growth rate does not mean that it will be able to exhibit the same successful performance in the future. If Turkey has the ambition to once again become a world power, it cannot act like other developing countries and it must get to know its weaknesses better. The first and foremost weakness of Turkey is its poor record in education and unless it makes great efforts to bridge the educational gap that exists between Turkey and the developed countries, it can only dream of being a world power.

First of all, let’s try to understand the present situation in Turkey. According to the Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat), as of 2009 around 7 percent of the Turkish population was illiterate and around 20 percent had not completed school, although they knew how to read and write. Nearly 25 percent had completed primary education while only around 7 percent had graduated from university. As of 2011, only 70 percent of students completing primary education go on to high school and more than 3 million students either stay at home or start working. The average number of years that Turkish people have spent at school is around six. I do not know if it is necessary to make any comment on this picture, but if I were a teacher at a primary school and asked the students what, in their opinion, “should this country, which wants to become a world power, do?” all the answers would probably be very short, clear and simple: “It should invest more in education.” Therefore, let’s look at how much Turkey spends on education.

The 2012 budget allocated for education (excluding universities) in Turkey is $20 billion, nearly 3.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), which has been described as a record for the history of the republic. (By the way, nearly all our ministers are making use of this “history of the republic” rhetoric to emphasize the magnitude of their success. Would it not be more reasonable to compare Turkey with other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) or the EU, rather than with its own past? This was my line of thinking when I compared Turkish export statistics for 2011, which at $134 billion broke another “history of the republic” record, with Belgium’s. The latter, a country with just one-seventh of the population of Turkey, exported goods and services worth twice this amount over the same period of time.)

Turkey’s investment in education

In comparison, the average proportion of GDP invested in education by OECD countries is around 4.6 percent. As the OECD country in which students spend the lowest average number of years in education, one would expect Turkey to spend more on education than the OECD average, particularly if one takes into account its educational report and enthusiasm for once again becoming a world power. However, this is not the case. When we describe progress as “a record in our history” without then comparing ourselves to others, we fall into the same old trap: Seeing ourselves in a magnifying mirror. If the country wishes to regain its former power, it is high time that Turkey put its energy into education and research and development. As a country that no longer counts itself as a developing nation thanks to its huge investment in education, South Korea might provide a good example for Turkey. In 1965, the GDP per capita in Turkey was three times higher than that in South Korea, but today the GDP per capita in South Korea is more than $20,000, considerably higher than that of Turkey. It is true that the imminent cause of this success is the investment in research and development and efforts to establish an industry based on technology and knowledge rather than imitation and imported technology. However, the main reason for the South Korean miracle is the huge investment that it has made in education since 1945, the end of the Japanese occupation.

The reason why we are comparing Turkey with South Korea is that the history of the development of education in both countries paints a very similar picture. For example, illiteracy in South Korea, which in the 1960s averaged around 30 percent, is now almost unheard of. The proportion of children participating in primary education in South Korea in 1996 was 100 percent, a figure that sits at around 99 percent in Turkey today. As of the late 1990s, almost all South Koreans of school age were able to finish high school, while today in Turkey only around 60 percent of children finish high school. South Korea now sees around 70 percent of high school graduates enrolling in university, compared with 6.7 percent in 1966. In Turkey, only around 30 percent of students completing their high school education go on to study at university. In terms of proportion of GDP, we see South Korea was spending as much on education in 1967 as Turkey will spend in 2012. Today, South Korea invests 4.8 percent of its GDP in education. In Hungary the figure is 5.7 percent, in France 6.1 percent and in the US 7.5 percent.

I am aware of the fact that the Turkish government is making great efforts improve Turkey’s educational record, and there has been significant development in this area over the last decade. But what I would like to underline is that current efforts are not in proportion to the severity of the problem. This issue is not only the responsibility of the Ministry of Education, nor just the state, but all institutions, public or private. This topic should be at the top of country’s agenda, and several campaigns should be organized to encourage more students to continue their studies at high school and university. It is saddening that three out of 10 students in Turkey do not go to high school after completing primary education and that this picture does not seem to disturb the general public.

In fact, the quality of education is even more important than quantity. An evaluation of the quality of our high schools and universities is a topic for another article.

Providing scholarships for students

Last, but not least, it is important to bear in mind that another reason for the South Korean miracle was huge investment in encouraging students to complete master’s courses and Ph.D.s, especially abroad. In Turkey, institutions could provide scholarships for students who are eager to study postgraduate courses abroad on the contractual agreement that the student would work for the company for a compulsory number of years after the course is completed. As of 2007, more than 62,000 South Korean students were taking undergraduate and graduate courses in the US, accounting for 10.7 percent of all foreign students in the country and representing the third largest group after India and China, both of which have populations more than 20 times that of South Korea. On the other hand, according to the US Embassy in Ankara the number of Turkish students studying in the US in 2010 was around 12,000.

To conclude, the average Turkish citizen studies for only six years at primary school, while Korean people are almost guaranteed to graduate from high school and most European citizens complete some form of university education. Without compensating for that huge gap in level of education, which could take at least two or three decades, to expect Turkey to enjoy sustainable and perpetual development would be unrealistic. Without bridging that gap and investing in research and development Turkey might be able to go on being proud of its rate of economic growth for a few years more, but that will be it. There is no prescription, other than education, for Turkey to become a world power once again.

* İhsan İkizer is a Ph.D. student at KU Leuven University, Center for Sociological Research.