The CHP's ignorance disproportionate to Turkey's level of education

However much the level of literacy in Turkey has risen numerically, we are living through very bitter examples showing that no great progress has been made in the comprehension, grasp and reading level of certain segments. If you like, let us first review in numbers the developments recorded in the field of education in Turkey during the AK Parti era, especially in the field of higher education.

In basic education, compulsory schooling, which was already 8 years, has been raised to 12 years, and our young people of school age living in the remotest villages have been given the opportunity and chance of education through a transported-schooling system paid for by the state. Meanwhile, with schools being opened and renovated rapidly, the number of students per classroom has been reduced to the twenties, and the number of teachers per student has also been greatly increased. By distributing textbooks free of charge through the state, the ideal of equality of opportunity in education has been approached as closely as possible.

In higher education, the number of universities in Turkey, which was only 76 in 2002, has reached 186 today. Previously, in the era of the so-called self-appointed "enlightened-progressive" administrations, there was open resistance to the opening of new universities. Far from making any effort to raise the rate of university enrolment, while an unimaginable effort was spent to turn away people who demanded a university education, now because of their dress, now through the coefficient practice, only 150 thousand of the 1 million 700 thousand students who demanded a university education each year could be offered this service. With the new universities opened in the AK Parti era, while the total was at the level of 1 million 900 thousand in 2002, the number of students today has reached 7 million 200 thousand.

Thus the net enrolment rate in higher education has risen from 14.65 percent to 43.43 percent. Meanwhile, the share of female students in higher education rose from 42 percent to 46 percent.

While reminding that the criticism made in the meantime, "a university cannot be made by putting up a signboard", was made about all the universities opened in the past, let us also say that all the newly opened universities of today have quickly reached the minimum level of the world's universities within a short time.

In fact, the university enrolment rate is considered in many indices as one of the indicators of a country's democratization. Because higher education is the most important channel through which people individuate and are enabled to take part in the process of governance in some way.

We know that in the US, with a population of around 300 million, the number of universities is above 5000.

To make a comparison, we can say that Turkey was very late on the road to universities and that even today we still have quite a way to go.

In contrast to the threefold improvement achieved in the university enrolment rate within 15 years, our number of academic staff has also risen from 76,090 to 151,763, that is, an increase of roughly twofold.

The resources allocated to our universities have also been continuously increased, from 3 billion TL to 42.2 billion by the current budget figures, that is, exactly 13 times.

Likewise, the share of higher education within the central budget has risen by 123 percent to 5.53 percent.

One would expect all these developments in the field of education to be reflected in the language and level of the media and politics in Turkey in proportion. After all, was not education the beginning of everything?

What we saw in the background of the news that suddenly erupted last week to the effect that the Presidency of Religious Affairs had said that small children aged 9 could marry showed that, whatever level education has reached in the country, it has had no reflection, no benefit whatsoever, on the intelligence, knowledge or morality of some people. Whatever you do is in vain. Although the Presidency of Religious Affairs said repeatedly that determining the age of puberty, or the biologically adolescent age, is not the same as determining the age at which a girl or a boy can legally marry, nobody could prevent the news from snowballing in this way. Yet in terms they would understand: "The age of adolescence is a biological age and it is not something that can change by the determination of the Presidency of Religious Affairs or any other person. The age limit regarding marriage, on the other hand, is determined by cultural conditions and laws. Indeed, as one moves from traditional, agricultural societies toward urban society, progress is made in the age of marriage and a decline occurs in the number of children." Basic knowledge of sociology, even of the level of social studies, is enough to see this truth, but Turkey's main opposition politician has not even received a share of this basic knowledge. Of course, this gap in basic knowledge can be closed; it should not be that hard. But if the noise continues even after it has been closed, the problem becomes clear as a serious moral problem, that is, a problem of jahiliyya. And the way out of it is only through God's guidance.

We also saw an example of the disproportion between the education level the country has attained and the jahiliyya being experienced in the CHP members' fixation on the prayer room and the toilet in the Speaker of the Parliament's office. We saw, from the wannabe-sleuth-reporter imitators among CHP deputies, the snooping that is peculiar to the 28 February jahiliyya but that we were more used to seeing in the media of that period.

Prayer room matter aside, it appears the CHP members have a separate obsession with this toilet issue. Kılıçdaroğlu, who had earlier run his tongue over the toilets of the Presidential Complex, thereby received a special invitation from the President to tour the Complex's toilets and see them up close.

What do these CHP members hope to find in toilets? Truly, this too is a separate matter of curiosity.