The fairy tale of high value-added production

Let us begin this article with a sentence from the April 2025 OECD Turkey report, and take a look at the protests by high school students to try and understand the root of the problem.

“The share of advanced technology in production is negligibly low. Medium-technology sectors need to create a competitive advantage in international markets by specializing and transitioning to the production of high value-added goods. To achieve this, it is essential to encourage innovation through research and business collaboration. Another area for structural reform is education.  Education reform that improves workforce skills is required.”

We encounter similar sentences in all efforts aimed at increasing economic prosperity and societal wealth in Turkey. I expect those who make these and similar recommendations to emphasize the issue of education very loudly and in great detail.   

Without education and planning, there can be no productive agriculture, no efficient, high value-added industry, and no competitive economy. 

They shut down the State Planning Organization. They used incentives entirely to enrich cronies. For a long time, I have asked, and continue to ask, “Let us engage in high value-added production, provide us with incentives” the representatives of private sector associations and organizations who say this.  

“In 2021, the President said there is a 'nass' (religious decree). Inflation and interest rates were neck and neck at 19 percent. Inflation soared to 85 percent, while interest rates dropped to 12 percent. Why didn't you invest in high-tech sectors at these interest levels, which were beyond free? Who was holding your hand?”

Thanks to such high negative interest rates, your profits exploded.  By saying 'we are making new investments,' you avoided paying taxes on your booming profits.  While you should have been paying a Corporate Tax rate of 25-30 percent, the effective corporate tax rate in Turkey remained at 10 percent. Some companies didn't even pay one-thousandth of their profits in taxes. Why didn't you invest in high-tech areas, and instead insisted on low-to-medium technology or real estate acquisitions?”

Many excuses can be manufactured for these questions, and many reasonable answers can be given. But the fundamental problem is this.  Incentives distributed without being tied to a plan are useless; they only serve to enrich cronies. 

THERE IS NO ECONOMY WITHOUT EDUCATION

The root cause of many of the problems we face today is education.

The government's education policy, stemming from its allergy to Atatürk and the Republic, is evident. In order to raise a religious and vengeful generation, they have distanced education from science at every level, starting from preschools all the way to universities.  

Search for it on YouTube videos. While Quran courses are provided to 4-year-olds in Turkey, what kind of education is being given to 4-year-olds in preschools in China, Finland, and Norway?

They had turned a vast majority of high school education into Imam Hatip schools. They scattered the teachers of the few remaining Anatolian High Schools and even begrudged them the schools called project schools. 

They dream of raising an ignorant and vengeful generation, creating a society that obeys and pledges allegiance to everything said. For this, they have caused massive destruction in education over the last 22 years. However, they will no longer be able to act against the spirit of the times.

First from university students and immediately after from high school students, loud and intelligently constructed protest actions are coming.

Teaching is a serious profession. An imam cannot be a teacher.  The violence perpetrated against students by the unqualified partisans they trained as teachers, the imams they inserted into preschools, and the cultist faith healers has ceased to be isolated incidents and has become almost routine. Do not be surprised if primary school students soon join the protests that started in universities and then spread to high schools.

 With the economic policies implemented over the last 22 years, the entire middle-income group, which makes up 60 percent of the population, has fallen below the poverty line.  Twenty percent of the population lives below the hunger threshold, and 60 percent below the poverty line. Worse yet, we are living in an era where children go to school hungry. Children and young people  are not receiving adequate nutrition in terms of protein and vitamins. Even among those who happen to receive a good education, all their hopes for the future have been stolen and darkened. 

EDUCATION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION (1)

While teachers were held in high esteem in this society during the early years of the Republic, they were unfortunately impoverished and subjected to character assassination through the moves of the counter-revolution, slowly at first and then with increasing speed.

If the cultural revolution pillar of a revolution remains incomplete, the revolution itself remains incomplete. This is the greatest misfortune that has befallen the Republican Revolution and the Atatürk Enlightenment Revolutions. 

With the counter-revolutionary move that began in the 1945s, the distribution of land to farmers (land reform) was blocked.   

The coalition alliance that blocked land reform also declared war on the Village Institutes. Let us recall the elements of this counter-revolutionary coalition: the majority of deputies within the CHP who were trying to resemble the Democrat Party, the last prime minister of the single-party CHP era Şemsettin Günaltay, the Democrat Party, the landed gentry, the merchant class, political Islamists, Chief of General Staff Marshal Fevzi Çakmak, and figures like the hero of the War of Independence and then-Parliament Speaker Kazım Karabekir. This counter-revolutionary coalition declared war starting in 1946 on the Village Institutes, which had been established on April 17, 1940, and were functioning quite well. 

İsmet İnönü could not prevent the deputies within his own party from being part of this alliance; he dismissed Minister of National Education Hasan Ali Yücel, who was a great supporter of the Village Institutes, on August 5, 1946, and appointed the Nazi-leaning Reşat Şemsettin Sirer as Minister of National Education in his place. His first act was to dismiss the father of the Village Institutes, General Director of Secondary Education İsmail Hakkı Tonguç, and appoint him as an Art and Crafts teacher at a middle school in Ankara. In 1947, in another counter-revolutionary move, the Higher Village Institute, which trained teachers for the Village Institutes, was also closed; the institutes were rendered dysfunctional and were completely shut down in 1952. 

This counter-revolutionary move against the Village Institutes between 1946 and 1952 meant the severing of the Republic's jugular vein and is the root cause of many of the fundamental problems we face today.

In 1948, as an inseparable part of the Marshall Plan, we entered under the guidance of imperialism not only in the economy but also in the education system through the Fulbright Agreement. 

Following the September 12, 1980 coup, the education system was shaped according to the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, in line with the U.S. Green Belt project. 

Finally, for the past 22 years under the AKP, we have had an education system that began with the slogan of raising a 'pious and vengeful generation' and has regressed further into medieval darkness every year. During this last 22-year period, the 'Turkishness' in the Turkish-Islamic synthesis was also forgotten. The segment that calls itself nationalist forgot its Turkishness and adopted Arab nationalism. 

There are two goals in this counter-revolutionary process in education. 

The destruction of national consciousness and the collapse of the nation-state...

By spreading poverty and ignorance,  Creating 'subjects who obey and submit to everything that is said' instead of 'free individuals who demand their rights'.” 

Meanwhile, as if the destruction they have wrought on our human capital through the education system were not enough, they are forcing our well-trained workforce to emigrate abroad, while simultaneously disrupting our demographic structure by opening the doors to millions of refugees who are uneducated, unskilled, and whose backgrounds remain unknown. 

This education system has manifested itself as a moral collapse in the social structure and an institutional collapse within the state. The result in the economy has been a departure from competition and productivity in agriculture, industry, and the services sector. We are still practicing primitive agriculture. The share of high-tech industrial products in our exports is only 3 percent. 

When we look at the economic success stories of many countries, we see what Gazi Mustafa Kemal Atatürk achieved in the field of education during the founding years of the Republic, what Hasan Ali Yücel and İsmail Hakkı Tonguç accomplished between 1940 and 1946, and what various other countries implemented in the 1960s and 1980s to achieve great success.

The secret to the Chinese Miracle we talk about today is not “cheap labor.”  It is the transformation of cheap labor into high-skill and creative power through proper education and planning, which is a long-term journey. 

We are told we must transition to high-tech, high-value-added production! 

It is impossible to achieve peace in social life or prosperity in the economic sphere without carrying out a fundamental educational revolution. 

(1) I will recommend three books to better understand the Counter-Revolution process in education.

Şevket Süreyya Aydemir, The Second Man, Volume Two (Remzi Kitabevi)

Prof. Dr. Çetin Yetkin, Counter-Revolution 1945-1950 (Kilit Yayınları)

Meriç Köyatası, Turkey's Factory Settings for the Twenty-First Century / Counter-Revolution in the Economy

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