Republican education and national consciousness

Turkey is a country with many problems, limited resources, and difficulty in utilizing its potential. Education is among the most significant problems facing our country. This is because the education system has been directionless and corrupted for many years. Because it has lost its national, public, social, and class-based nature; its secular, scientific, enlightenment-oriented, co-educational, free, equal, and populist character, it cannot meet Turkey's needs. It does not satisfy students, teachers, parents, or society.

In education, it is possible to list dozens of problems at once: from the content of textbooks to class sizes, from teacher training policies to the lack of technical equipment, and from approaches that exclude reason and science to the limitations on the organization of education workers. Furthermore, education is problematic not only in terms of quality but also in terms of quantity due to high population growth, lack of planning, and insufficient resources.

WHAT DID THE FOUNDERS OF THE REPUBLIC AIM FOR?

Education is the fundamental tool for an individual to develop and liberate themselves. It is the primary way for a human being to learn about themselves, nature, life, and the great development of humanity. Education provides this knowledge along with cause-and-effect relationships. Education, whose primary goal is to raise qualified citizens, is an ideological concept alongside its scientific and technical qualifications. It has an intense relationship with the homeland, citizenship, and patriotism. Having grasped this reality very well, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk attached great importance to education, ensured the unity of education with the Law on Unification of Education (Tevhid-i Tedrisat Kanunu), and considered secularism, scientificity, populism, and enlightenment as the foundation of education. At the same time, he drew attention to the public-spirited and public-benefit dimension of education. As a rational and realistic revolutionary who took reason and science as his guide, Atatürk aimed to create the citizens of the Republic and a modern nation while changing the education system with a revolutionary understanding. Atatürk said the following in 1922:

“Let us all remember the name of the school with respect and reverence! The school teaches young minds respect for humanity, love for the nation and the country, honor, and independence. It teaches the most correct path to follow to save independence when it is in danger. Those who strive to save the country and the nation must also be honest experts and hardworking scholars in their professions. It is the school that ensures this. Only in this way is it possible for all kinds of initiatives to reach logical conclusions.” (Atatürk’s Speeches and Statements, Volume 2, pp: 42 – 43)

While raising qualified individuals and citizens, education also strives for citizens to be meticulous, sensitive, and careful regarding language. It equips individuals with certain principles and values while also transferring the great accumulation of humanity to them. It treats humans in their entirety with their reason, emotions, and behaviors. It contributes to their maturation and development. The Republican Revolution also adopted the creation of modern humans, and through this, reaching a modern society, as the fundamental goal of education. For this reason, the understanding of education is one that has internalized universal values and is national, secular, scientific, populist, and enlightenment-oriented. Because of these qualities, anti-Republican classes and segments, by cooperating with imperialism, have liquidated the Republican understanding of education and its cadres over the years.

WHAT KIND OF EDUCATION?

Our competent thinker Server Tanilli, who emphasizes the quality of education importantly and frequently, emphasizes in his work titled “What Kind of Education Do We Want” that the purpose of education is to create humans and citizens, and underlines that education is a national concept that also contains universal colors in its essence. He emphasizes that the Republican Revolution, which made secularism the fundamental mortar of the unity of education in order to raise free individuals and enlightenment-oriented citizens, aimed to raise generations open to universal culture.

What Republican education understands by nationalism is defending the realities of its own country, the values of its own nation, and the interests of its own state. This is a deep-rooted, comprehensive step that had not been seen or experienced in the Islamic world until that period. Its goal is to raise generations that are “free in thought, free in wisdom, free in conscience,” in the words of our great poet Tevfik Fikret, who greatly influenced Atatürk. This is exactly what imperialism could not stomach and what it liquidated.

Education is one of the areas most attacked and corrupted by capitalism and neoliberalism. Therefore, it has largely been removed from being a citizen's right and a public service. It has been placed at the service of the market. It has been turned into a service that the rich, the privileged, and the favored receive with money under market conditions. However, education is a public service whose financing should be based on public resources. But globalization has liquidated the public, social, and national nature of education and destroyed its enlightenment-oriented and scientific aspects.

Today, education and science institutions are in a largely marketized structure where remnants of feudalism and medieval structures are influential, and holding companies come to the fore. In this respect, it is also ideological and class-based. Because there is a system where the rich access quality education with money, while the poor are deprived of the right to quality education. Education has received its fair share from privatization, just like health. Now, the university rector and school principal are CEOs, in the fashionable term. The university and school are businesses. The faculty member and teacher are marketing personnel. The student is the customer. Unfortunately, the same situation applies to the chief physician, hospital, doctor, and patient.

SCIENCE IS IDEOLOGICAL

The distortion of the science-market relationship cannot be hidden with polished words like “university-industry cooperation.” Because in the liberal order, in the production, property, and distribution relations where capitalism dominates, science and education are at the command of the market. Whoever, which classes, primarily cover the cost of education and science—that is, whoever pays the money to the private school—the results, findings, and discoveries of education and science are primarily offered to the service of them, those classes. This bitter truth was seen once again in all its nakedness after the COVID-19 pandemic. Just as which classes in the USA caught the disease more and which classes benefited from treatment services first is not independent of that country's class relations, this truth is valid for the whole world, including our country. During the epidemic process, in vaccine and drug studies, it was not public hospitals or public universities that came to the fore, but giant global pharmaceutical companies.

The health army of the Republic and the health institutions that have not yet been privatized, which some in Turkey ignore, insult, and belittle by calling them “parentheses,” “commercial break,” “created trauma,” “left wreckage,” or “period of persecution,” have served the public with great devotion and effort. The laborers went to state hospitals again. They expected the health service they received or could not receive from the health institutions in the hands of the public, not from private hospital chains or health centers affiliated with holdings.

Today, R&D studies are at the service of industry and the private sector rather than science. In the science-society relationship, science has lost its leadership. It has been replaced by big capital. When R&D is mentioned, industry and high technology come to mind. But areas that do not appeal to the market and do not see demand in the market are not thought of at all. In private universities and foundation universities, no one sends their child to study in faculties and departments where the probability of finding a job after graduation is very low, paying 200 thousand liras, 300 thousand liras, or 400 thousand liras annually.

CONCLUSION

Those who oppose the Republican, secular, national, populist, scientific, and enlightenment-oriented character of education, no matter in whose name they do it, actually serve imperialism. In the past, the ideology, class character, and policies followed by those who attacked the Village Institutes, which went down in world education history as “Turkish invention educational institutions,” and those who had these schools closed, coincided with the demands of imperialism. Today, the relationship between education and politics continues with the same intensity. It should not be forgotten what those who try to make Turkey a “little America” have done to the Turkish language, Turkish culture, and the Republic's understanding of education; and the suffering they have caused to the culture, art, and science people, poets, and writers who are the source of pride for Turkey.

Without being national in language, culture, and education, one cannot be independent in economy, technology, politics, foreign policy, and national defense. A scientific and industrial breakthrough cannot be made. Therefore, a country whose education system is not strong, successful, and qualified cannot be expected to be strong and ambitious in other areas.