26 April
American Fiction 
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April 24, 2024 "Our Strength is In the Good" - Interview with Mia Ivryn
April 22, 2024 Lovers In Auschwitz
April 19, 2024 Passover: Celebrating the Miracle of Freedom
Op-Ed: To Make a Janissary Chase Santa Claus
In the 21st century, half the population of Turkey does not read books. 80 percent has never gone to a play in their lives! Democracy in Turkey cannot raise a man of the world. Without adopting an ideological approach, let’s discuss this for the sake of Turkey’s future.İvo MOLİNAS
After the Turkish War of Independence, in Turkey while only 4 percent of the population was literate, 80 percent lived in villages. In order to establish a new nation state, Ataturk and his friends looked for ways to increase the education level of the people in general by primarily teaching the illiterate how to read and write.
They found the solution in ‘Village Institutes’. By blending contemporary world values with local elements and integration with Ankara, they embarked upon a journey to educate Anatolian people who for centuries were neglected by the Ottoman Empire and had no access to education.
The archives state that at the beginning, the main objective of the Village Institutes was to raise teachers for the education of young people living in villages. In time, the institutes also started to provide education for children living in villages. The courses included all branches of social and positive sciences, art and music. It’s even stated in historical archives that those institutes taught pupils how to play certain music instruments including traditional saz (a stringed instrument).
The project was implemented shortly before Ataturk passed away. The great enthusiasm and achievements at the beginning of the project could not be maintained due to CHP’s (Republican People’s Party) poor management and the opposition party’s labeling the institutes as ‘centers for raising communists’. In 1952 when Democrat Party came to power thanks to democracy, it shut down all ‘communist centers’ thus the Village Institutes project vanished in history.
Even though Village Institutes trained 17 thousand teachers, today it’s only remembered vaguely as a nostalgic entity which was unable to achieve its task with regards to Turkish Age of Enlightenment.
Since then, while there is almost no village left in Turkey without a school and while within the last 10 years tens of new universities opened, the depressing results of a recent survey about Turkish people’s level of education and understanding of arts/philosophy somehow reminded us of Village Institutes. After a period of an unfinished divine mission, the current state of education and values of the people of Turkey who with the exception of interim periods were run by political parties that described themselves as rightist/conservative are really devastating.
Ipsos KMG Research and Consultancy conducted a survey about the lifestyle and attitudes of Turkish people. For the survey titled ‘Guide to Understanding Turkey’ 16.000 people from all around Turkey were interviewed. Let’s take a look at some the highlights:
While 84 percent of respondents say that their favorite activity is watching TV, 96 percent say that they’ve never seen an opera or ballet in their lives. The study also reveals that 80 percent of respondents have never seen a play and 56 percent have never gone to a movie. While 68 percent of the respondents have never surfed on the Internet, 45 percent have never read a book in their lives!
Aren’t these figures scary enough?
Let’s leave aside the fact that 94 percent of the respondents have never travelled abroad, but 45 percent have never even travelled within Turkey.
The brief interpretation of these results is like this:
More than half of the Turkish people throughout their lives lived only in their homes, their neighborhood or their village. Almost half of them have no connection with the outside world, let alone with other regions of the country or other people. They only see the world and even their country, through TV. Literally, they do not know any other person, his city, his culture, or his tradition since he doesn’t touch him. They cannot participate in art’s’ and philosophy’s search for truth and quest to understand mankind. They pass their time at their ‘non-examining’, ‘always local’ and ‘always the same’ corner. Naturally, it is not possible for someone who doesn’t know the ‘Other’ to know about the world or universal facts or human facts. In such a confined community would you be really surprised that 18 percent of women believe men have the right to slap them?
Since these results will not advance this country in any field, I don’t think they satisfy any political power even though the current one has the support of half the people in Turkey.
When we look at the results of Prof. Yilmaz Esmer’s recent Turkish Values Survey, we can see that both survey’s results coincide with each other and this even makes us more upset. The confinement mentioned above, clearly explains the fact that 70 percent of Turkish people don’t want Jewish neighbors and 65 percent don’t want Christian neighbors as revealed in the results of Turkish Values Survey.
It’s obvious in today’s Turkey which is called a Conservative Democracy, not enough global, tolerant and democrat people can be raised. Unless we put together Marcel Proust’s quote “Art helps people comprehend the fact that there is another world beside their own” and Prof Ioanna Kucuradi’s quote “We are working in the field of philosophy to allow people to live as a person should live” together, some of us will continue watching absurd scenes like a janissary chasing Santa Clauswith pride and some of us with bewilderment.
However, we must all know that if somethings don’t change, sooner or later we will all hit a wall.
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