| Dear Gentle
Reader,
I promise that next month I will write
once more about ethereal and aesthetically pleasing matters and that I
will once again wax eloquent about the rare and generally
under-appreciated subtleties of Turkey. However, at the moment I
still have this bee in my bonnet -- the education bee. For those
of you who aren’t interested, who find this topic oh-so-very tedious
and boring, I have to say that if you seriously plan to stay here in
this country (or any other, for that matter) you must be concerned with
education. The quality of education affects all of us, not only
those who are students. It has everything to do with the quality
of the goods and services we purchase and the kinds of attitudes and
behaviors that we encounter in social situations and in public, on the
streets. Education affects a nation’s social, economic and
political policy, too. Good education results in the kind of
governance that can help the people reach their highest potential or
degrade and dehumanize them. While this column is certainly not
the place to talk of what the most radical and visionary form of
education should be, it
strikes me as an appropriate place for developing some of the modest
ideas about the educational system in this country that I introduced
last month.
To begin with, I have to say that there
is a crisis in education that must be faced. If it isn't there
will be disastrous results because the children we are currently
educating are the future of Turkey.
The first stage of education begins
at home. Very young children become caught up with what most
everyone else is caught up with in "New Turkey" and it's
important to realize they learn from television, parents, family
and friends. What is it that lots of them are learning these
days? They’re learning that money is the most important
thing in life and that after money come status and image. (I’ve
had second-graders get excited about the fact that my cep phone is a
late model Nokia! I didn’t even know what a brand-name was when
I was their age.) Our children are also learning how to wear
a mask, a false face -- the face that one wears for all public (and
semi-public and sometimes, in extreme cases, even deeply personal)
occasions. The time-honored Turkish ideals of honor, sharing,
tolerance and abundance have been lost for the most part and have been
replaced with a false image of those things, in spite of the fact that image
can never replace reality; in spite of the fact that there were sages in
the incredible history of this country who knew all this and dedicated
their entire lives trying to teach others what they knew.
If any nation wants to achieve true
greatness it must work on producing truly great human beings.
The first step is to realize our responsibility for making this
happen. I said that our children learn -- they do, but what they
learn is what we teach them! So the first step after
accepting that it is we who are responsible for our children
is to make a conscious decision to teach them well.
That means we must teach them what quality, excellence, tolerance, and a
spirit of inquiry mean.
Let's look at our schools. Even in
the best private schools classrooms are grievously overcrowded.
Although student teachers are frequently exposed to pedagogical
methods that are radical departures from the traditional methods of
memorization, rote learning, and recitation, such methods are virtually
impossible to apply in a classroom of between 30 and 35 students.
(Remember I'm talking about private schools here -- obviously government
school classrooms are even more crowded.) These methods
emphasize group work, group discussion, and interaction. The
task of trying to apply such methods is made even more difficult by the
fact that in an attempt to keep parents happy (parents are after
all paying customers and in the new Turkey private schools are
businesses more than they are anything else) students are not
"tracked" -- we don't have remedial classes and we don't have
honors classes. That is to say, even if Ahmet or Fatma
is terrible in mathematics he or she is put in a class with
kids who are good at math and if Zeynep and Mustafa are
good at math they may be put in a class with kids who can barely do
simple subtraction. This is often rationalized on the
grounds that such placement is "democratic" -- it isn't
democratic at all; in fact, it is grossly unfair, not only to the
Ahmets and the Fatmas but to the Zeyneps and the Mustafas. It
creates a "no-win" situation because it means that almost
none of the students are able to get what they need from math
class. Students who need a slower pace and more individual
help can't get it and those who would benefit from more high-powered
curriculum can't get it either -- in spite of the fact that each child
is unique, each one is forced into the same "common
denominator." The result is that the brightest students are
kept behind (and are left frustrated, discouraged and bored)
while the poorer students don't get the basics (and are also left
feeling frustrated, discouraged and bored).
A large contributing factor in this
situation is that the basic framework of the Milli Eðtim system has not
(to my knowledge) been changed since it was first instituted during the
1920's. What worked then doesn't work now. Minor,
cosmetic alterations are not sufficient. What is needed is a
complete overhaul and the overhaul should not be done by politicians,
but by genuinely sensitive and caring human beings who are professional
educators, including persons with training in philosophy of education. Besides paying
attention to mainstream education we need to make available training and
funding for special education so that every school is able to cope with
the needs of learning-disabled children and students with special needs.
All schools need to be in a position to make special education resources
available and at the same time, we should also have schools that are
entirely devoted to special education for children with severe
learning disabilities. We should also initiate programs in all
schools that are particularly geared to identifying and educating gifted
and talented students.
In addition, our current emphasis on
technological education is shortsighted and if it continues there will
be a huge price to pay in the future. It is not enough to teach
students how to do computation and use computers. We must teach
them how to think. Much of the current pedagogical thinking
equates mathematics with mere computation and science, even physics,
with mechanics. The theoretical and qualitative aspects of both
disciplines are neglected in favor of the "practical" ones.
While school curriculum does include a subject named 'philosophy'
it is limited to teaching formal definitions of philosophical terms and
facts about the history of philosophy. It does not teach
students what it means to think philosophically, much less what it means
to be a philosopher. Moreover, there are huge gaps in the
curriculum that is offered. It appears that students are
taught basic facts pertaining to classical philosophy (Aristotle,
Socrates and Plato), then jump over centuries to the Enlightenment
philosophers (Descartes, Kant, Leibnitz, Hume, etc.) and then again to
the Post-Modernists (Foucault, Derrida, et al.) Students get
no sense of the continuity and development of philosophical thought over
the centuries. All of the above amounts to the fact that we
are short-changing our young people by not encouraging and
developing their capacity to think theoretically. Students are not
taught how to actually do philosophy themselves and the end result is
that they do not know how to think.
Let me close by making one final, very
important comment about teaching and teachers. What is teaching,
really? Well, teaching is not the process of stuffing facts into
empty minds. Far from it. The English verb "to
educate" comes from the Latin ‘educere’ meaning to ‘draw
out,’ ‘to lead out.’ So teaching means leading out,
bringing out the excellence that is already potential in a student. Our
children are hungry for teachers to feed them, to nourish them in this
sense and we are cheating them because this is not what is happening.
Even the fortunate ones are merely getting superficialities:
computer labs, flashy step exercises, luxurious school buildings and
equipment; they're generally not getting the substance of education,
only the appearance of it. All human beings, and especially
the very young, have a keen sense of the possible; they have
hope, they are, -- if their environment allows them to be -- infinitely
creative. Teaching in this deep sense is an art, not a science
that can be replicated by following formulas, and it produces results
that cannot be reduced to mechanically producing the answers to
one-dimensional multiple-choice questions. By the same token,
teachers themselves are not mechanical devices but persons who are
entrusted with the care and feeding of young persons' entire beings.
In contemporary Turkish society teachers are placed on a level only a
little above the cleaning staff of schools. Teachers are
not valued. They are not respected. Certainly, they are not
paid well; in many cases they are paid about the same as municipal
garbage truck workers. Does this mean that we've forgotten what
Atatürk said about teachers? Unfortunately, I think it does
mean we have forgotten. Yet Atatürk knew how important
teachers are in helping to create a great nation.
In the end, it all boils down to a
question of priorities. If we remain focused on short term,
relatively superficial gains, not much can change. On the
other hand, if we lift up our eyes from the ground and cast
them in the open-ended direction of the future -- our future --
radical, qualitative changes in our educational system will necessarily
follow. The choice is ours. |
