The real problem in teacher appointments is the faculties of arts and sciences

One of the main issues on the education agenda is the problem of teacher candidates who cannot be appointed, or as they put it, teachers who have not been appointed. The state appoints around 50,000 to 100,000 teachers each year, sometimes fewer. However, the number of teacher candidates waiting for an appointment is approaching one million. Naturally, this situation creates many victims. Young people who spend years dreaming of becoming teachers and graduate from university end up experiencing disappointment and cannot be appointed. Unfortunately, under this stress, many young unemployed teachers are driven into psychological crises.

The reason teacher candidates cannot be appointed stems from the gap between the number of appointments and the number of teachers waiting for an appointment. In other words, if there are far more graduates than you can appoint, these graduates naturally accumulate, and an army of unemployed teachers is formed. Actually, what needs to be done is very clear. If there is no need, then it is necessary to reduce the number of university graduates and balance this situation. In fact, positive steps have been taken over the years regarding the number of faculties of education and their quotas. It might be more ideal if some of the faculties of education had their quotas reduced or were closed down, but even as it stands, there does not seem to be a major problem there. So, where does the real problem stem from?

The main source of this supply-demand problem is that there are more faculties of arts and sciences than necessary and their quotas are also very high. Graduates of these faculties can additionally obtain a pedagogical formation certificate to become eligible for teaching. As a result, thousands of people are included in the teaching system every year. By the way, the person writing this article is also a teacher who graduated from a faculty of arts and sciences. Therefore, I have no objection to this; those who complete their subject knowledge in faculties of arts and sciences can become very good teachers by obtaining a formation certificate. However, it must be stated that these faculties produce more graduates than necessary, and most of them should be closed or their quotas should be narrowed.

The most striking example of the situation I mentioned is occurring in the Turkish Language and Literature branch, from which I also graduated. In this branch, education is provided in only 8 universities as a faculty of education, and only 210 people enroll in these universities each year to become Turkish Language and Literature teachers, while the arts and sciences version of the same department exists in 117 universities, and 10,266 students enroll in these departments every year. So, as can be seen, there would actually be no problem if only graduates of faculties of education were appointed to this branch. Everyone who finishes the department would be appointed, but when an extra 10,000 people are added, it becomes impossible to get appointed. This situation, which I exemplified for the Turkish Language and Literature branch, also applies to high school branches such as history, geography, physics, chemistry, and biology.

In this case, it must be stated very clearly that the problem of unappointed teachers does not stem from faculties of education, but from faculties of arts and sciences. The main source of the problem is the faculties of arts and sciences. If YÖK and the Ministry of National Education want to produce a solution to this problem, they must put aside populist policies and immediately reduce the number of faculties of arts and sciences, and not stop there, but also lower their quotas. Only in this way can the masses waiting for appointments be reduced, even if only slightly. Otherwise, these faculties will continue to be factories for unemployed teachers.