The prep-school issue of our education system

Today's event that the Prime Minister will hold in Diyarbakır is, under the conditions we are passing through, a major event of historic meaning with intense symbolic messages. One side of the conditions we are passing through concerns Turkey's democratization and resolution process, and even further, the ground of the new social contract that Turkey is establishing with its own history and people. The other side concerns the sum of the new initiatives Turkey has launched regarding all the areas of tension in the region.

In fact, Barzani's meeting with Prime Minister Erdoğan in Diyarbakır, and the concert that Şivan Perwer and İbrahim Tatlıses will give together at this meeting, show how much the space for political maneuver in Turkey has by now widened. An event like this, which could hardly have been thought of even a year ago, when it comes onto the agenda today creates a very positive excitement in society rather than worries. Moreover, this excitement is not limited to Diyarbakır alone; across the whole of Turkey it arouses the feeling that Turkey is going toward something better.

This meeting without doubt shows that we have reached yet another brand new and now irreversible phase in the resolution process. It is also a clear picture that Kurdish politics has become thoroughly diversified and that the monopoly on setting the agenda of this politics is not in the hands of the PKK.

Indeed, nothing could be more normal than the echoes of this meeting having been the main agenda item of Turkey for days. Both because of the road covered in the resolution process and in terms of the returns of Turkey's improving its relations with its neighbors..

Yet on such a day, in fact for days, the one and only agenda item of the Zaman and Samanyolu broadcasting group is the prep schools... It is becoming increasingly difficult to make sense of the broadcasts made over regulations concerning prep schools that are as yet only drafts and open to debate. In an environment where rapid progress is being made in the resolution process, while the country's most important issue is advancing on the path of resolution, the attempt to draw all attention to the prep schools in the manner of agitative campaigns leaves strange impressions.

The education issue has been one of Turkey's most important issues that from the start could never be put on the way to a solution. The failure to put it on the way to a solution is in fact largely due to the issue having been handled ideologically. Admittedly, the education process by its nature is not a process easily separable from ideology. Especially when one considers that even science has a "spontaneous ideology"... However, a national education understanding that imposes forced ideologies, which take no account whatsoever of the values of society, on children as if by brainwashing, ignoring even the parents' preferences, has constituted the essence of the matter.

The problem also has a more functional dimension concerning the raising of generations suited to the spirit and needs of the age. Perhaps because it has always prioritized being excessively ideological, Turkey's education system has not been able, and is not able, to raise strong scientists, literary figures and philosophers who can open out to the world. This is a serious problem, and the solution of this problem requires more fundamental debates and reforms.

The AK Parti has made revolutionary progress in the field of health that will serve as a reference model for the world. It has made model developments in the same way in the fields of transportation, housing, services and politics-democratization. All the developments made are in fact consisting of policies promised in the party program at the very stage of the AK Parti's founding. In the field of education, again incomparably good work has been done compared with past works, but the essence of the matter has still not been touched. Yet from the beginning, what was to be done or needed to be done in this field was also being said, accompanied by analytical balance sheets of the current situation. In those balance sheets it was mentioned that the prep schools, which have gradually become a parallel educational institution in secondary education, constitute a problem that is the source of many other problems. That is, regarding the prep schools there is a diagnosis that does not belong to today, that has nothing to do with the cemaat, and that relates entirely to the functionality of educational institutions, and a policy vision appropriate to it. The accuracy or inaccuracy of this diagnosis can of course be debated. But for the whole Zaman group to take it as a move or war of the government against the Cemaat is very wrong. Meeting a technical matter entirely concerning the future of the country, such as education, with a kind of cemaat or Camia resistance, and tying the matter thoroughly to emotion, also prevents the issue from being discussed in a healthy manner.

Indeed, meanwhile, what kind of data do we have to verify what we hear about the contribution the prep schools make or do not make to class mobility in Turkey? Do the excessively emotional and partisan assessments we hear these days in the group's broadcasts reflect the sociological dimensions of the matter? Within this defensive emotionality, it is hard to take a clear photograph of the event.

It is certain that the prep schools have turned into an economic sector that cannot easily be ignored. This sector also produces its own sociology. What the savings to be made here will cost must of course be well calculated. However, the ministry's preparatory draft already states that no victimization will be caused in this regard and that measures will be taken on it.

On what the sociological function of the prep schools really is and whether they provide more education for the poor and destitute, we are at a very different point from yesterday. In an environment where the coefficient practice has been abolished and the number of universities and their quotas has increased to this degree, the function of the prep schools is changing too. Because of the quotas of universities having nearly tripled, we are already heading toward a point where almost nobody who wants to study is left out. Even so, it is inevitable that competition to study at better schools will continue to prevail.

Evaluating the subject far from emotionality, entirely on the scale of efficiency, functionality and rationality in education, is an urgent need. For the issue is not the problem of a community or of a party; it is Turkey's problem.