Turkish Awakening (16 page)

At school I studied
Hard Times
, and thanked my stars that the likes of Mr Gradgrind, the fact-obsessed schoolmaster, and Bitzer, the chillingly well-informed teacher’s pet, were a thing of the past. In Turkey, they are not. Dickens describes the young victims of Utilitarian education as ‘little pitchers to be filled up with facts’, and this is a disturbingly apt metaphor for Turkish schoolchildren, uniformly grinding their way through years of fact-cramming to one exam they sit at the age of eighteen: the national university placement exam. This 180-minute exam consists of 160 multiple-choice
box-ticking questions, which means the papers can be easily marked by computers; even Dickens’s gloomy exaggerations are trumped by the digital age of assessment. The Dickensian enemy of Fact is Fancy, which is equally detrimental to the Turkish education system. Imagination is an unhelpful distraction when it comes to cramming for exams – accurate memorisation and regurgitation of the correct answers is all that really matters. Turkish teenagers are so used to these methods that when it comes to university, they are firmly set to cramming mode, unused to critical thinking and almost past the point of learning anything in the spirit of discovery. I began to feel guilty whenever I taught my students anything that wasn’t on the syllabus that, ironically, I myself had set (Latin is an extremely niche subject in Turkey). I was not, in fact, teaching – I was merely talking while they looked at me as if to say: ‘Why are you wasting our time?’

Turkey’s university and high-school attendance is relatively low: 31 per cent of adults aged between twenty-five and sixty-four have earned the equivalent of a secondary school qualification, much lower than the OECD average of 74 per cent. Those who do continue, however, work extremely hard, to a prescriptive and exhaustive curriculum, and they are mercilessly examined. Turkish schoolchildren go straight from school to the
dershane
– a private ‘lesson house’ – to cram a few more hours of study in before bed, and these are not just the children with pushy, moneyed parents. Examinations are tough and increasingly competitive, with 1.6 million students fighting for four hundred thousand university places. The
dershane
exists solely for the purpose of exam preparation and has become the norm for every schoolchild,
regardless of wealth. On a bus in Urfa, south-east Turkey, I met a man who worked as a caretaker for a German archaeological team. He told me about his family – his daughter was blind and, while the state helped pay for a braille teacher, he spent more than half his income on sending her and her brother to the
dershane
. So even though the state provides free schooling in Turkey, effectively it is not free for those aiming for university because normal school hours are not adequate to keep up with the required standard. There is a similar situation in Taiwan and Hong Kong at the moment, where parents spend disproportionate percentages of their salaries on their children’s education. It has become a sordid mathematical equation of money + extra schooling = some ambitious % increased chance of university entrance.

The Turkish
dershane
reminds me of my own experience of the Japanese
juku
, a comparable kind of cramming school which is as widespread in Japan as the
dershane
is in Turkey. I attended a state primary school in London, with patchy levels of teaching, especially in the maths department. Aged nine, I had a Japanese friend called Aki who was brilliant at maths, and who often declined my offers to play after school as she went to an after-school study centre called Kumon, a hugely popular Japanese crammer now available worldwide. My parents decided this was the thing for me, and I attended, miserably, for a few weeks. Hour after dreary hour of symmetrically aligned, repetitive sums was only made worse by looking around the silent ‘classroom’ at the heads of my more studious peers bent over their individual work. Academic progress was measured by the ratio between the speed at which we could complete a page of sums and the number of mistakes
we made in that page, as though we were computers of variable efficiency. Aki was, indeed, brilliant at maths, as are most Turkish schoolchildren, but at what unquantifiable, Kumon-defying cost?

There are those who accuse
dershane
and
juku
owners of excessive profit seeking, exploiting parents’ fears of their children’s failure for their own financial gain – there is almost no price a parent is unwilling to pay for their child’s education. Kumon alone is worth $650 million, and it is impossible to estimate the value of the market as a whole. There are even darker rumours circulating in Turkey about collaborations between religious
dershane
s and the government; it is said that the education ministry secretly feeds the answers of national exam questions to
dershane
s
run by Islamic groups, to ensure that religious children get places at top universities. As with all conspiracy theories in Turkey, this has a high likelihood of being false. What is certain is that the market for after-school crammers is hugely profitable and, sadly, as open to corruption as any other institution anywhere in the world.

The commercial competition between various
dershane
s can be vicious. The average Turkish town in the run-up to September will have several large billboards advertising the top students of a particular
dershane
, their photographs emblazoned with exam percentiles and names alongside: local teenage superstars arranged in first, second and third place like Olympic champions. In Istanbul and Ankara, the adverts might have a clutch of names followed by famous American universities to show off the number of students who achieved the Holy Grail of parental ambition thanks to the efforts of
this particular
dershane.
Every July when results come out, newspapers and television channels descend like vultures on the top few students in the country and conduct interviews with these rather dazed child prodigies. If the struggle for university places is a war, then the
dershane
is a form of warfare, and the war will continue until more university places are created.

The Turkish Education Ministry says it cannot afford the extra teachers and examiners necessary to reduce class sizes and broaden the national examinations, given the volume of applicants. One of the attractions of the national university application system is that it is actually very fair, because it is based entirely on multiple-choice questions, the answers to which are either right or wrong: clinical and dry, perhaps, but straightforwardly quantifiable, unlike arbitrary essay marking. Turkish students are graded and placed within a national percentile which determines which universities will accept them. The scheme is totally anonymous, so no one knows who you or your parents are, as opposed to the system in Britain and America, where personalised applications – including personal statements and interviews – give the admissions department an accurate estimation of your socio-economic status, whether they use that information or not. Ivy League universities are notorious for accepting a handful of average students whose parents have been generous to the school’s coffers, justified by what they call the ‘legacy’ system of favouring the children of alumni. This arrangement ensures future donations to the school, which are used for the benefit of all students. There are pros and cons of this system, but it is not something that Turkish universities engage in, at least
on an official level. If you are clever, that is reflected in the calibre of the university which accepts you in a relatively uncomplicated way.

The Turkish system of assessment, while technically fair, does not encourage or reward critical thought. Some of my brightest friends from school and university in England would probably be classed as simpletons if they took the national exam, because while they can write brilliant essays on the imagery of James Joyce, their knowledge of simple algebra is lost in the mists of time, thanks to the British system allowing subject specialisation from the age of sixteen. It gives one food for thought – thousands of high-school dropouts in Turkey may be stuffing kebab buns as they ruminate on Rumi, literary geniuses thwarted by their own one-sided intelligence and bumped off the conveyor belt of Fact to make room for duller, more mouldable students. Given this background, one can see how İbrahim the Shakespearean eccentric was such a unique individual. He was not cleverer, but merely more independent-minded than his peers, and that made all the difference to his approach to life.

A question remains: why are Turks so obsessed with doing well in exams? On a material level, entry to a high-ranking university will lead to a good degree and a well-paid job, which everyone wants. But beyond that, there is an acute concern with the status that comes with all of that. The top five per cent of students in Turkey study electrical or industrial engineering as a matter of course, simply because it is considered the most demanding subject. Even if a top-grade student has an intellectual appetite for architecture, literature or psychology, they would be extremely unlikely to choose
any of these courses because they would be passing up the opportunity to be recognised as the best of the best. Their family would be horrified, for one thing.

In Turkey you do not study for yourself or for the subject itself, you study for the respect and money it will earn you. Young professionals follow the dictates of their milieu when it comes to education, but this crowd-pleasing instinct is true across Turkish society – in commerce and social attitudes as well as education, as I will discuss in the next chapter. It is a very dangerous thing when it comes to education. It means that there is a lack of outstanding professionals in sectors like mental health and architecture, because these careers are considered secondary to engineering and conventional medicine.

On a brighter note, careers in the arts are gradually getting more popular in Turkey. I talked to an arts management director who has worked in Turkey for thirty years, and who was very excited that school-leavers in Turkey are increasingly enrolling in graphic design and music colleges, defying the limits of mainstream education, and opening up galleries or starting film companies. There is a significant underground music scene in Istanbul, with a particularly large French following who come for particular DJ nights at niche electro clubs. It is not really fair to compare Istanbul to London or New York on the arts front, because it is simply not such a well-established cultural capital. The fact that it is even considered in the same class is a huge compliment given that, until recently, it was the biggest and most problematic city of a turbulent country beset by huge economic problems. Now it is catch-up time, and many curators and festival organisers I have spoken to predict that Istanbul will soon be
able to contend with major international cities for genuinely cutting-edge arts and design. Turkish artists like Cannes Grand Prix winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan, artist Tracey Emin and Nobel Literature Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk – to name a few of the über famous – are in some cases more famous abroad than in Turkey. Emin, for example, who is half Turkish Cypriot and grew up in Britain, would never have gained the prominence she currently has if she had pursued her career in Turkey, or indeed Northern Cyprus. Whatever you may think of unmade beds and sketches of anthropomorphic genitalia, they represent a kind of art more warmly received in Britain than in Turkey. Perhaps, with a growing number of brave young artists, this is set to change.

While criticising the herd-like mentality of the average Turkish classroom, it would be wrong not to mention the incredibly brave individuals who protested on university campuses against the suppression of freedom of thought, long before the Gezi protests swept the country. Turkey has the highest number of imprisoned journalists in the world, and it is notoriously dangerous to have any kind of link to anything in the manner of Kurdish rights or leftist-sympathising groups – the mildest of connections to either of these is construed as sinister ‘anti-Turkish activity’. While I taught at Boğaziçi, there were several protests on campus, but the most memorable was that stemming from the arrest of a female student who was discovered by police to have made a job application to a leftist thinktank. Her boyfriend organised a protest against her arrest, collecting signatures from his fellow students to petition for her release. As I arrived for work one Wednesday, banners demanding ‘Free Özge!’ were being
strung up outside the undergraduate common room by her friends. On Friday, Özge’s boyfriend was arrested and this was duly protested against by the friends who remained, in a sad cycle of futility.

Students who dare to question state university fees are equally at risk; fees are low by British standards, but cause much controversy. In June 2012, two undergraduates, Berna Yılmaz and Ferhat Tüzer, were sentenced to eight and a half years each for unfurling a banner which read ‘We want free education and we will get it’ in front of a building in which Prime Minister Erdoğan was holding a meeting. Initially held for eighteen months in custody during the trial, the two were finally convicted of membership of a terrorist organisation. This organisation was not, to my knowledge, identified by the court, probably because there was no such membership. Yılmaz, a student of archaeology and Tüzer, an engineer, are in prison as I write. When they are released they will be in their early thirties, without the degrees they started ten years earlier.

In July 2013 Erdoğan announced that police would be replacing private security at state universities. This came in response to the Gezi protests where, according to Erdoğan, young protesters were wandering around ‘with Molotov cocktails, machetes and whatnot’. The image of Boğaziçi University’s leafy campus dotted with armed police is a terrifying one and prompts the question: whom exactly will police be protecting, the students or the state?

Terrorist links and ‘insulting Turkishness’ have always been convenient excuses to lock up troublemaking students and intellectuals, and the desire to avoid these charges has greatly
influenced the development of academia. Broadly speaking, leftist-leaning academics are vilified, while dons who write papers along acceptable nationalist lines are promoted – in the eighties, for example, professors were sacked because they refused to shave their bohemian (and therefore leftist) beards off. This is changing now as nationalism becomes less
de rigeur
under the current government. Schools, too, are getting less nationalistic, though not by European standards. Most Turkish schoolchildren still take a regular oath of national allegiance; they learn in great detail about the life and teachings of Atatürk and his face is on every wall. A primary-school teacher I spoke to told me that she gets her children to write letters to Atatürk thanking him for his life’s work, to personalise their Turkish history lessons. This teacher told me with pride that one child expressed her regret that Atatürk’s mother never lived to see his full achievements. Another letter contained a paragraph dedicated to the beauty of his blue eyes. This is more than a little strange for a European who comes from a country with no equivalent background of hero worship – when it comes to the Turks’ relationship with Atatürk I often feel like I am intruding on a private relationship that is, in fact, confusingly public. The Atatürk-centred education of Turks does not stop at school. In the first term of every university degree, no matter what it is, there is a mandatory course on the founding father of modern Turkey.