Wednesday, September 29, 2010 

I saw an article in the Turkish Daily News yesterday on the issue of Kurdish education in Turkey. The issue is getting some attention in the wake of last week's school strike in southeastern Turkey, which led, according to some reports, to "thousands" of Kurdish children staying home.

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan is already on record as saying he opposes education in Kurdish.

I've always thought that it was cruelly unfair that some of the poorest, most educationally unprepared schoolkids in Turkey, people whose villages are often packed in with snow for much of the winter, also have to deal with the handicap of being taught exclusively in a language they (may) only have a grasp on through television. The people teaching these kids are often ethnic Turks from the west of the country who have been sent east to teach kids who, at least initially, often don't speak or understand Turkish very well.

After a few years of muddling through, the kids eventually learn enough Turkish to get through, or else they drop out. But what kind of an education are they receiving in the meantime? In a country where educational opportunities are increasingly cutthroat and competition for placement in decent secondary schools is incredibly intense, forcing people in an entire region of the country to just find their way through an educational system taught in a different language is cruel and discriminatory.

What an incredible handicap! 

If the Turkish government is unprepared to allow Kurdish as a language of education, I think that at the very least some effort could be made to teach Turkish as a second language to Kurdish students in the southeast. 

An abbreviated  Turkish hazirlik, or preparation program, for Kurdish kids would at least signal a recognition that these kids have a real need for which the state, I think, has a responsibility to provide a service. 


I don't think we'll be needing to send very many of these to the SE anytime soon

Of course, nobody wants this. Kurdish nationalists want Kurdish, not Turkish as a second language, while Turkey's growing number of Kurdophobes would object as well.

But some sort of practical solution needs to be worked out for this. Even the head-in-the-sand types who insist that the "SE problem" is only a problem of investment, etc. should recognize what an incredible drag on a region's development this half-assed way of educating some of Turkey's most education-needy citizens constitutes.