Turkey’s responses to globalization, especially in the context of the harmonization discussions with the EU, have been uneven. In the fields of finance, business and commerce, certain aspects of culture such as sports and entertainment and tourism, they have moved with far greater speed than they have in the field of education. In this field, they seem to be especially ill-prepared to face the fact that by 2010, Turkish high school diplomas have to comply with the Lisbon convention so that all member countries of the EU can recognize each other’s school diplomas for the purpose of university entrance. Yet even within the EU, there is not much uniformity regarding educational standards and philosophies. This actually provides Turkey with an opportunity to learn from the experiences of other European countries and distill the best practices to create something of their own.
I will now attempt to provide a philosophical foundation for the self-imposed Turkish challenge of meeting the EU criteria in education. The occasion for doing this is the 17th Council on Education that lasted for all of last week in Ankara. The title of this piece was one of the discussion topics there, but what I have to say has little directly to do with the EU, or with the harmonization process. Instead, in gathering together some points I would have presented at the Council had I been invited, I will sketch an ideal curriculum that I believe will prepare students for the demands of the world towards which I think they are moving. I will also outline methods of teaching and assessment that would support such a curriculum in order to be prepared for the future world that I will describe. In what follows, my reasons for ignoring the Turkish drive towards the EU are twofold. Firstly, the drive itself is losing momentum rather rapidly, because of political anxieties in Turkey as well as in Europe. Secondly, I believe that the motivations for improving the education system in any country, not just Turkey, ought to be provided by a vision of the future, not by an exigent political or economic alignment. Although my arguments are based on the Turkish experience, they could apply equally to other countries.
If one agrees with my description (elaborated below) of the world in which students are going to work and live, then it would seem that the current education system is doing a pretty poor job of equipping them for that world. This is partly because students are mostly being taught knowledge and skills that were useful in the world that is past. They have an education system that does very little to help them connect with the world that they encounter in their own lives. On the all too rare occasions when they do, it is despite, and not because of, their education system. Even less does it prepare students to understand the world that impinges on their lives from outside in the shape of economic and cultural influences conveyed through the media and entertainment and news. Despite the mandated teaching of modern languages, and some improvements in the curriculum of primary schools, in the social studies they seem to be preparing them for a world which consists of just one country – Turkey, and just one culture – Turkish. Until recent tentative attempts to introduce a component of world history and modern history in the high school history syllabus, the history taught was heavily oriented to a study of the foundation of the republic and Ataturk’s life (i.e., up to 1938). No history was taught for the period after Ataturk's death. The curriculum assumes, moreover, that the world can be understood mostly through the tools of science and mathematics, and literature and the social sciences have a minimal role to play in making sense of the world. The requirements for the study of human societies are minimal for science students, as if they somehow needed to be less aware of the ways societies and individuals play a role in changing the world. The whole curriculum is infused with a bias towards positivism and behaviourism.
The assumptions about human learning underlying the curriculum are similarly obsolete and out of touch with current understandings. This is reflected in an assessment system that emphasizes recall over understanding, and examinations over concrete demonstrations of understanding. In order to enter institutions of higher learning in their own country, students have to undergo a test that is so universally feared for its high (above 85%) failure rate that it has spawned a multi-billion dollar exam preparation industry. According to some, the exam requires and tests for synthetic understanding, while most claim that it acts as a filter for keeping the numbers of new entrants to universities to the number of places available. It does not test how well prepared they are for university learning, but only how rapidly they can recall the techniques that are taught for rapid-fire responses to over a hundred multiple choice questions in 180 minutes. Consequently, while the university entrance exam is the ultimate arbiter of a school's success, schools as well as students (supported by their parents) are unable to resist defining their educational accomplishments in any way except by their success in the university entrance exam. The curriculum written for the high school by the Ministry of Education is crowded out by the university exam syllabus written by the Higher Educational Council (the YÖK), independently of the Ministry. In fact, collaboration and communication between these two pillars of the country's education system has only just begun - a classic case of the right hand only just beginning to find out what the left hand is doing. Meanwhile, Turkey's youth spend their middle to late teens and even early twenties enveloped in a miasma of obsessive anxiety about passing this exam. Their schools, knowing to what they owe their reputation, follow obligingly if they can. (The exceptions are some private schools with long established reputations for delivering what is regarded as a "good education".)
Let us for a moment put ourselves in the shoes of Turkey's youth and ask ourselves how we would feel in such a predicament. We would probably feel entrapped in a situation that we were incapable of changing, although we could see that it needed change. We would feel frustrated and alienated from our older generation, and would express that frustration in ways that would help us forget our helplessness, and give us a false sense of power and meaning in our lives. We would hold our senior citizens in contempt for exhorting us to excel and to bring glory to our nation, yet doing little that equipped us to do just that. We would observe that despite the great cultural wealth of our own country, we would need to go abroad, at least for a while, if we wished to make an impact in the world of science or technology or the arts.
In last week's Educational Council deliberations in Ankara, academicians, educators and educational bureacrats from the Ministry of Education and the YÖK and other institutions met ostensibly to consider what they should do to change this state of affairs. Instead, the council deliberations were beset with controversy over earth-shaking matters such as the weighting coefficients for students of religious schools in their university entrance exams, and whether to extend the system of centralized testing for university entry to the last three years of high school as well.
No surprises then that Turkey's youth are only dimly aware of how unprepared they are for the world that they will face, and do not know what to do about it. There are few signs that the politicians and bureaucrats who design educational policies in Turkey know any better about the world that students in this country will encounter.
Let us then start with the question: What kind of world will today's students live and work in?
Firstly, it will be a more complex world, meaning that the number of different factors that will influence the world will increase. But the difference between the world today and their world tomorrow will only partly be a matter of degree, since the quantitative changes will gradually create qualitative ones. The increasing complexity of the world, will, beyond a point, also stimulate the creation of new factors, new forms of interaction between them, and new institutions and other structures through which these interactions will occur.
Secondly, it will also be a world of greater interdependence. This interdependence will continue to manifest itself at at least two different levels: between nature and human societies, and between national actors like the state and its instruments, institutions like corporations and civil society organizations, and communities.
Thirdly, the interdependence will be global, not only in the sense of transcending national, cultural and even continental barriers, but also encompassing nature as well as human communities.
Finally, it will be dynamic in the sense that most of the interdependent factors will themselves be changing constantly, often in ways that are not entirely or at all predictable. There will also be a greater demand for skills of collaboration and of effective communication, of resolving conflicts and building peace and justice. These skills in turn will call for more sensitive intercultural understanding as well as for cultural self-confidence.
How would educators cultivate these skills and dispositions required for the kind of world that their students are likely to live?
They would need a different kind of curriculum, and therefore a different understanding of pedagogy. Such a curriculum would aim to develop skills of critical and analytical inquiry, of creative problem-solving, of thoughtful evaluation of actions and ideas. Such a curriculum would be based on certain principles, foster certain values, inculcate attitudes, develop abilities and encourage practices that underlie and facilitate the bridging of social and cultural differences.
The principles underlying the curriculum would include the recognition firstly that human universals underlie diversity; and secondly, that human diversity and differences are valuable both in themselves, as well as being resouces for survival and flourishing.
The values underlying the curriculum must include care for each other and for the planet; compassion, responsibility and respect for other beings, despite their differences; and the equality of the dignity and worth of all human beings.
Such a curriculum must encourage attitudes such as friendly and respectful curiosity, empathy, commitment and willingness to collaborate.
The abilities to be developed in such a curriculum must include seeking patterns, links and relationships between different perspectives; comparing and contrasting across differences, and seeking universals; exploring critically and empathetically beliefs and perspectives students do not share; respecting people who are different and treating them with dignity; and building understanding across cultural and social differences.
Finally, such a curriculum would also foster practices such as communication and dialogue with others who are different; collaborating across human differences towards common goals; resolving conflicts and building reconciliation and peace; and serving the community (adding to its long term social capital), whether local or global.
In order to form connections with the real world, such a curriculum would stimulate curiosity about the world by organizing itself around stimulating questions or themes about real-world issues and problems. It would encourage the student to pursue his or her own inquiry, and would regard the standard disciplines of natural and human sciences, mathematics, language and literature as windows into the ways human beings have thought about the world and organized their understanding of it.
The role of literature and language in such a curriculum would encourage students to develop cultural self-confidence by a study, first, of their own culture, their own history and society, by using their own cultural knowledge, but always placing these studies in a global context, so that the student sees his/her own culture as one that has developed in relation with others, and capable of influencing other cultures as much as being influenced by them. Secondly, the study of another language and literature other than the students' own would provide a basis for the nurture and enrichment of cultural intelligence. I should add that “cultural self-confidence” is not intended as code for cultural exclusivism, arrogance, superiority, or jingoism. Instead, it is the ability to see the students' own culture (that culture with which they identify) as a distinctive voice in the choir of civilizations. There may be parts of the song where the voice is silent, but it is not thereby rendered less important or valuable as a result. The “global context” is where they can hear the entire choir.
In the social sciences, such a curriculum would build awareness and respect for human dignity and diversity by studying different ways in which humans have expressed themselves in different situations, and exploring ways in which humans have accepted or transcended the limitations imposed by their own history, geography, biology or culture. It would encourage the exploration of human universals by the opportunities in all disciplines, especially in the natural sciences and mathematics, for exploring the unities underlying human and natural diversity. Throughout such a curriculum, opportunities would be designed for students to reflect on how they learn, and to connect the perspectives of different disciplines. It would also have structured opportunities for experiential learning, especially through community service activities.
I have so far outlined the kind of curriculum that I believe would enable students to prepare for a future that will demand dealing with diversity and continuous learning throughout life. But what kind of teaching would support such a curriculum? This could then suggest ways in which the training of teachers itself would need to change to accommodate the kind of curriculum I have outlined above.
The style of pedagogy that would support such a curriculum would recognize that knowledge is not just expressible in language in statements about the world, but also embodied in artifacts and performance. As teachers, they would need to recognize the diverse and plural nature of knowledge. Knowledge is after all meaningless without human beings. If human beings are already so diverse, then knowledge must be even more so, and so must the ways by which knowledge is made. Teachers would also acknowledge that there is more to be valued in knowledge than truth. There is also beauty, usefulness, compassion and balance. There is more in knowledge than can be expressed in just words, that shows itself in the execution of a perfect dance maneuver, or a creative scientific experiment, an elegant mathematical proof, or an expressive performance of the ud. This is the kind of knowledge that Michael Polanyi referred to as tacit knowledge.
The pedagogy that I have attempted to describe would draw on a balanced selection of local and global knowledge from the real world, and organize the knowledge around significant themes and issues. It would help students to choose appropriate concepts, metaphors and theories to build understanding, and apply and test that understanding on a real problem. It would equip the student to correct and improve on current understanding through reflective evaluation of the results of testing. It would also flexibly apply relevant knowledge and skills to make sense of new situations. It would allow the student to demonstrate understanding through performances and artifacts.
This teaching would create a range of activities allowing learners scope for individual as well as collaborative inquiry, and also allow some scope for inquiry that is trans-disciplinary, to enable students to experience apply skills learnt in one disciplines to other areas of learning, and to explore the different perspectives of each discipline. Above all, this teaching would provide opportunities for reflecting on the learning process to evaluate one’s learning, to discuss one’s learning with other learners, and to collaborate in build learning communities within the school.
What kind of a teacher would foster this kind of practice? The answer was given some time ago by Resit Galip, a former Minister of Education in a speech at Istanbul University in 1933:
“The teacher is not a machine for giving lectures, but is a resource to the students - one who inspires them to investigate and question, one who guides them and one who is able to sustain their enthusiasm for study and research. The real teacher is himself a life-long student."
How far is the teaching profession from this ideal? Judging by what I observe of my own teaching practice, I can see that I have a long way to go before I can claim to represent Galip's ideal teacher. But aside from my own shortcomings as a teacher, I also see that the conditions impelling a movement towards this goal are also absent. Students are generally hungry to learn, but are served such poor fare that their appetite for learning vanishes quite rapidly early in their school life, and is replaced with a hunger for grades. They are taught to abhor mistakes or failure, which are among the best stimulants for learning, and encouraged to think of earning grades as a measure of learning. The content of much of what they learn is unrelated to the world they live in, and exams are generally not designed to promote or test for understanding. For all these reasons, any attempt at redesigning the school curriculum in national education must be accompanied, if not actually preceded, by the re-education of teachers. But although they do realize that the lack of good teachers is a problem, the systematic re-education of teachers is far from the minds of those who control educational policy here.
As in many other countries, a larger vision for undertaking a thorough-going reform of national education is missing in Turkey, except perhaps in some rare private initiatives. Despite ministerial declarations to the contrary, current attempts at educational reform will therefore remain at the level of patchwork and tinkering, and subject to party-political and ideological whims of the moment reflecting the many fissures in Turkish politics and society. Since its inception as a republic in 1923, Turkey has witnessed at least two rather radical re-designs of its education system. Perhaps it's time for another one.
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