What did YÖK do?

YÖK's decision to abolish the coefficient policy was presented by a section of the media merely as "the way has been opened for the İHLs." We cannot even be surprised at this blatant distortion, because the rights violations caused by this irrational policy, which has been applied for 11 years and, if looked at closely, has brought nothing but harm to any segment in Turkey, have been internalized to such a degree that injustice has become the norm of the system. Yet from whatever side you look, the coefficient policy is a policy you would be left holding. Whether you look at the matter from the standpoint of rights and law, of the rationality of the system, of social peace or of secularism, you see it standing like a dagger plunged into the country's breast.

YÖK has removed precisely this dagger. By opening the way for the Imam-Hatips it did not provide them with an extra benefit; it removed an inequality that had been applied against them for 10 years. Before, when this inequality did not exist, it had been imposed for the sake of a stubbornness of the 28 February coup-making mentality.

With each passing day we understand much better within what kind of criminal network 28 February was cooked up, yet the deeds of that criminal network can still be treated with a brazen "reason of state." Practices concocted in that period, each of them far removed from every sociological foresight, culture of social peace and political prudence, and which, on the other hand, contain all the elements of a crime to be committed deliberately against society, are presented as normal and there is a wish to make them permanent.

The coefficient policy is important enough to go down in the history of education not only of Turkey but of the world as a very special example of class and ideological discrimination, of pedagogical scandal. Doctoral theses on it would be well deserved. While the rising values of the world in education are interdisciplinarity, developing the conditions of effective freedom by multiplying options of choice, rewarding individual achievement and ensuring equality of opportunity, it was a policy that rowed against the current of all these trends. An understanding that condemns people for life to a field they chose at a very early age (14) has no place left in the contemporary world.

Contemporary education rests on a concept that includes the means to answer a person's wish when he wants to rebuild his life at whatever stage he wishes. Yet with the coefficient policy people are forced to separate at an early age, and everyone, in his later life, has to look at other ways of life from his own little island. Because of this, a complete uniformity begins to prevail in the dough of knowledge and meaning of the young people who are raised. Yet in the absence of the coefficient policy, because transitions between fields are possible, the possibility, through these transitions, of synthesizing different horizons, different understandings and ideas enriches the world of science and diversifies it enormously.

Transitions, by letting different disciplines, theories and understandings rub off on one another, provide an extremely fertile environment for science.

As a scientist and educator I am a living witness of how much the coefficient policy has made even all fields of science shallower and more uniform over the last ten years. The limits of this article of course do not suffice to explain that students coming from different high schools contribute much to one another within a scientific discipline, and of course to that discipline.

Meanwhile, the claim, made by those who meddle in the subject with their half-baked knowledge, that vocational high school students are subject to similar restrictions everywhere in the world is definitely not true. In the often-cited Germany-Austria example too, the paths from vocational high schools to universities are in no way closed. There the criterion is entirely individual achievement. Those who study at the schools known as Realshule or Heaptschule generally attend these high schools because they could not achieve the success to continue to the Gymnasium. But at every stage they can complete their scores and transfer back to the Gymnasium, that is, to the high schools that prepare for higher-quality universities, and even without ever transferring to the Gymnasium, they can go to the universities they want at any time if they do not fall short of the sufficient conditions of the university they want. The only criterion in this matter is individual achievement. There is never an approach that regards the school they graduated from as an obstacle to them.

Therefore this can never be compared with the practice in our country. Because of the coefficient policy here, a person is subjected to evaluation not by his individual achievement but because of the school he attended in secondary education. Whatever the person's achievement, the school he attended has a grade of its own, and when a child enrolls in that school at 14, this grade sticks to him like an indelible stamp for life.

Thus, as if there were not enough of them around us already, people who have been reduced to a state of complete "prisoners of fate" by the education system come to constitute the human resources of Turkish society.

With the coefficient decision, YÖK has dispersed this feeling of being a prisoner of fate and has ensured that individual achievement is regarded as the basic criterion.

It has shown the courage to do what is normal in an environment where doing what is normal is difficult. I congratulate it.