On the new National Education curriculum

Education, as one of the most fundamental institutions of human socialization, is an activity that takes place not only in schools but at every stage and in every place of life. When viewed as the production and distribution of certain systems of meaning, taking place from within the family through working and professional life, religious communities and institutions, houses of worship, neighborhoods and even the streets, one must undoubtedly devote separate and special attention to the education system and its components that are specially structured for this task. Here, of course, we do not intend to hold a debate that will exhaust nearly everything about education. However, on the occasion of the programs that the MEB has put up for display and opened to discussion, besides producing or eliminating class structure and social inequalities, we need to touch on a point or two regarding how much distance we have covered in terms of the possibilities of emancipation.

From the expressions used in presenting the programs, we see that we are faced with a significant total of programs, the product of labor focused on increasing the capacity of the average individual and the communities to which this individual belongs to sustain the values they hold. In this respect I congratulate everyone who has sweated over and labored on the program and not withheld their contributions, and especially the teachers and academics. For by giving importance to and placing at the center the values that make us who we are, they have produced and set before us a program that is both extremely qualified and high in number. Moreover, they have put it up for display, with extremely democratic maturity and self-confidence, in order to receive contributions.

Right at the outset I want to say that it is clearly seen that the qualities the programs aim to impart (which are technically referred to in the programs by the term "attainment") make references to acquired qualities that, in a life made easier by the industrial revolution and opening great material possibilities to people, declare and indicate that mass poverty is no longer necessary and that reduce people's condemnation to certain given qualities. Education, in the sense of the institutional structuring of learning processes, gained its revolutionary content through the achievement of mass and generalized literacy. This situation, which manifested itself before the nineteenth century through the mobilization of an entire population for literacy, has reached its peak in the new programs with the attention paid, in Douglas Kellner's phrase, to "multiple literacies." Multiple literacy skills such as mother tongue and foreign language competencies, mathematical literacy, information literacy, technology literacy, financial literacy and health literacy, which are seen to be taken into account in the programs, are an important and hopeful approach for our future. The programs put on display herald that, thanks to the multiple literacy skills to be imparted with this approach, we can take part with all our individuals as active subjects in the development of more mass languages or communication media that will be valid among all people today and in the days to come. In yesterday's world (as P. Bourdieu claimed and relatively proved), the status of the child within the family was predetermined and fixed at birth according to the family's social position and the child's position within the family. The new MEB programs, on the other hand, with the multiple literacy skills to be imparted in today's and tomorrow's world, will prepare our children to deserve their social positions and for a productive transition into society, and will provide all young people with universal standards and equal opportunities through which they can earn their status with the labor of their own hands. In other words, in terms of the foundations on which and the goals for which they are structured, the new programs appear to transmit to students in schools a cultural capital that has not been inherited. Thank God!

In modern times the most important function of education was to create suitable citizens for nations. The importance of equality in education, as far as it could be realized or emphasized, was also to be able to have the monolithic wholeness that the notion of nation of that period required. In the modern world, truly great distances have been covered in terms of equality of opportunities or mechanisms in education, and at least important critical horizons have been opened and widened for this. However, although this of course does not mean that education has become completely detached from its ideological function in the global world, it may at least mean that education has lost the function of being a crude production of a closed-circuit national ideology. In this respect too, for the programs, it can be said, with a quick glance, that an important effort to put everything in its proper place makes itself felt. For, as far as I can follow, the claims that some subjects have been reduced or removed, made in the context of the simple and banal observations put forward in the name of debate, stem from not understanding this transformation of mentality. Yet in the programs referred to in the debates this transformation of mentality is clearly seen. On a chronological line, all our values from yesterday to today are both appreciated and presented in the context of their relations with other values. Of course, that human rights and responsibilities have been included in a curriculum for the first time is also a situation worth dwelling on separately.

In short, with a quick glance at the computer and information technologies, geography, history, philosophy, natural sciences, mathematics and other programs, we can say that the MEB, with a light, plain, up-to-date and innovative approach, has made an important breakthrough toward making up for our lateness to the age. In this regard, of course, one must congratulate first of all our Minister of National Education, the esteemed İsmet Yılmaz, together with the former minister Nabi Avcı who also labored on this work. And also the undersecretary Yusuf Tekin, whom I know very well to have a special intellectual merit in grasping the spirit of the age, and Alparslan Durmuş, Chairman of the Board of Education and Discipline...

Keeping the curriculum on display for a period of time in order to open it to all kinds of contributions is also a fine practice, as an example of participatory democracy in a field like education that concerns everyone.

However, in closing, I will not pass without recalling a truth that should serve in place of a warning. The curriculum is, in the end, a road map, a prescription, a content that stands there. Far more important than this content or road map itself are the competence, merit, aptitude, sufficiency and motivation of the educational actors who will implement it. It is also clear that we need a completely separate effort on how we will ensure this.