Turkish Awakening
Page 16
I wanted to work out what fuels the Turkish obsession with volume, repetition and uniformity. Turks are, traditionally, great believers in safety in numbers. If asked where they would live in a perfect world, most would probably answer: ‘In a site.’ A site (from the French cité) is a characterless gated community, with identical apartments, security guards and a token patch of garden within high walls. Pre-installed on all televisions within the apartments is a direct link to the building’s security-camera screens. It is very telling that Turks are generally less concerned with where they live and more concerned with the building in which they live – provided, of course, that the neighbourhood is respectable (which is to say, full of similar sites). Apparently, people feel safer in the environment of a site, but what exactly they feel safe from was a mystery to me for some time. Today, crime is impressively low in urban areas and there are no obvious reasons to feel threatened.
The political upheavals of Turkey’s past have a lot to do with the apparently baseless paranoia common to the Turkish middle class. In the years preceding the military coup in 1980 in particular, politically fuelled violence was common in cities and people at large were in considerable danger from various warring political gangs, most of all the extreme nationalists. A friend of mine, now in his fifties, remembers being beaten up by members of the National Front in the late seventies simply because he went to a high school at which German was the main language. The memories of these times live on, and although there is no equivalent physical persecution on the streets any longer, the fear remains, and has most recently been fuelled by the Gezi protests. Even before the protests, the old lady who lives on the fourth floor of my building had steel shutters on her (definitely inaccessible) back window, which I found amusing in a depressing way, like watching a hypochondriac swaddled in wool on a fine summer’s day.
Turks still feel vulnerable on the international stage, and are arguably insecure at the epicentre of a conflicted geopolitical region. Much of their insecurity is historical, ingrained. The lingering sense of unease which persists from past troubles has resulted in a conviction of safety in numbers. On top of that, there is a swiftly growing middle class, which brings with it the old-fashioned, middle-class brand of paranoia that manifests itself as curtain-twitching in English suburbia, and is certainly not particular to Turkey.
As I described earlier, a village-like sense of community is still obvious in traditional neighbourhoods in Istanbul. While the relative novelty of supermarkets appeals to many city-dwellers, in small neighbourhoods people often prefer the daily visiting vegetable seller, not from any kind of individualistic consumer stance but because everyone else in the vicinity buys from him. He is a trusted part of the community, and in a strange way more unifying than an anonymous supermarket. On the other hand, malls are hugely popular. Galleria Atakoy in Istanbul was the first, modern mall built in Turkey, in 1988 – the Grand Bazaar of 1461 was the labyrinthine, long-lived precursor to the security-checked, concrete constructions of today. There are now 366 malls in Turkey, new ones popping up all the time for locals who crave their comforting, highly polished vastness. A mall delivers a reassuring sense of community in its own way; like a site, everything is contained within walls, other respectable people of middle to high income are buying from the same shops, and nothing is unknown or threatening. More than anything else, a trip to a mall is a fun day out for a Turkish family, especially in Istanbul, where there are hardly any green spaces.
I have never been to school in Turkey, so for a while I did not appreciate the link between the mass mentality I have been describing and the Turkish education system. However, about nine months in to my stay in Istanbul I was offered a post teaching Latin at the Boğaziçi (Bosphorus) University, situated next to Mehmet II’s ‘Throat Cutter’ fortress on the European side of the Bosphorus. I had no formal teaching experience, I was in fact younger than some of my students, and my only qualification was that I had studied classics at a British university. Why did they hire me? Partly because there are very few Latin teachers in Turkey, but also because no one else would accept the ridiculously low level of pay offered by a state university. Ceyda Seçim, the charismatic don who persuaded me to take the job, was very honest about the state of things: ‘Our teachers are here because they love it.’ Fair enough, I thought. The following week, I represented the entire Latin staff of the university.
Boğaziçi is a puzzling paradox; currently ranked the top university in Turkey, it is modelled both architecturally and academically on an Ivy League university, while receiving totally inadequate funding from the state. It looks like Princeton from the outside and Wandsworth prison from the inside and follows the American style of courses composed of majors and minor options. It also follows a highly inflated grade system, which led to a fiasco when I came to mark my students’ papers at the end of the year. Dealing out the kind of marks normal to an English university (where anything between sixty and seventy per cent is average), I awarded my students a clutch of what I considered unremarkable grades. A couple had done surprisingly well, a couple not so well. Within a few minutes of publishing their grades, I had received a deluge of emails from my students demanding an explanation for my outrageously low marking. One student asked, with chilling politeness, whether perhaps I had not received one of her answer sheets? Others were frantic, and one student, whose major was in genetic science, declared that I had ruined his life. I realised – rather late – that Boğaziçi followed the American system where anything below the eighty per cent mark is shamefully low. What I did not understand was why they felt entitled to demand that I increase their grades in such a hysterical and entitled manner. A fellow teacher explained: ‘They think of you as a civil servant. They are studying in order to improve their chances of getting a good job, and they won’t let you stand in the way of that.’
Boğaziçi picks the very best high-school applicants from national exam results, and boasts some great teachers, despite the ludicrous state salary. The department heads live in constant fear of their staff decamping to private universities like Koç, Sabancı, Bilgi or Yeditepe, where private funding is plentiful. I fear it is only a matter of time before Boğaziçi runs out of the historical cachet which currently ensures its top position.
I was so impressed when I first walked onto the campus for my interview: grey stone, ivy-wreathed buildings around a sun-dappled quad, an oasis of Ivy League sophistication in the middle of Istanbul. Inside the buildings is a different matter – the unmistakable smell of industrial detergent in dark corridors, walls badly in need of paint and no lift in a building of six storeys. Just like the rest of Istanbul, lazy feral dogs command the outdoor realms of the campus, and cats occupy most rooms – curled in library shelves, under desks, begging at tables in the canteen.
On the first day of term, I strode confidently into class, books in hand. To my dismay, I was faced by rows of expectant students, pens at the ready, who looked at least as old as me. In an effort to impress upon them my infinite knowledge of all things Latin, I began to talk airily of Catullus and fifth declensions, but was soon interrupted by a tortoiseshell tomcat who completely ruined the gravitas of my teaching style by leaping onto my desk from nowhere. When I shut him out of the room, he mewed pitifully until allowed back in. From then on, I learned to embrace all manner of teacher’s pets.
Boğaziçi is woefully underfunded. At the beginning of December in my first term, I arrived on campus one day to find the Western Languages building covered in scaffolding and workmen; the inside had been partly gutted already, and drills pierced the usual scholarly hush. I picked my way through exposed piping and buckets of paint to find the registrar, Yelda. She told me that all my classes had been relocated to the engineering department on the other campus for the foreseeable future.
‘I see. Why?’
Yelda gestured at the rubble encroaching into her office and looked at me wearily. ‘The department still has some of its budget left and has to use it by the e
nd of the calendar year. They decided to renovate the building.’ The unbending rules of state funding meant that the university would lose this portion of the money unless they used it before January. Instead of being saved for the next order of books for the understocked library, or added to the teachers’ salaries at the end of the academic year, it had to be used now. So the run-up to December exams was blighted by noisy renovation; students struggled to find relocated classes and fought for precious library space as exams loomed, but the departmental budget was safely spent.
By contrast, the atmosphere in private universities like Koç is heavy with wealth and privilege. Renovation is the last thing needed, for one thing, the university having been built in 2000 by the multibillionaire Koç family. Car parks are full of Porsches, books spill out of Gucci handbags, and its fees ensure that – with the exception of a few scholarships – only the graduates of expensive private high schools can attend. The universities boast correspondingly expensive teachers, for example the celebrated historian Norman Stone, who has now left Koç for Bilkent University in Ankara, another private institution. Stone is a superstar among history buffs, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher and a bestselling author of genuinely gripping historical tomes, and yet he has been lured to teach on a remote university campus in central Anatolia. It is a significant and impressive choice, and partly reflective of the standards of private Turkish universities.
Teaching the products of the Turkish educational system at university level made me realise what the system was all about. My students were very bright, and had been picked for their exemplary grades at national high-school entrance exams, but their lack of interest in the subject was disheartening even for an accidental Latin don. The course was an elective rather than a core subject, so the students could be excused for not being as invested in Latin as in their major courses, but it was still rather sad that the most common question I ever got asked was: ‘Will this be in the exams?’ The answer ‘Yes’ would be met by a frenzied scribbling of notes, ‘No’ by a vaguely reproachful blankness.
Only one of my students asked anything in the spirit of enquiry rather than for exam-focused information. He was a unique individual in more ways than one, and my first introduction to his particular breed of intellectualism was a quasi-Shakespearean email he sent in response to a businesslike query about weekly timetables that I had sent to the entire class before term started. His reply was clearly the product of much toil with a dated dictionary, his style both elevated and constrained by a concern to be as polite as possible to a new and potentially draconian teacher. I copy it below:
Good Night Milady,
I am indeed sorry if I bother you with my misunderstandings, but the group to whom you’ve sent the underlying message has already taken both Lat 111 and 112, hence are they all the would-be members of the 211 class.
As for me, my schedule is totally available on Wednesday, thus it is a perfect niche for me to fill in with the Latin classes. Lastly, I would like to manifest that I might come to see you any time you find appropriate after 13:00; but if that would be beyond conveniance for you, I might as well chime in to the remaining party at 5 o’clock, at the place assigned.
With my respects.
İbrahim
I was of course delighted with this email and looked forward to meeting its author; he did not disappoint. A leftist, despite his formal English, he would stay behind after class to discuss Marx and the Beatles with me, and one memorable afternoon he delivered an awkwardly phrased but impassioned polemic on the atrocities committed by America on the English language. According to İbrahim, Americans should not be allowed to speak English, because it is a language fit only for the elegance of traditional English expression, as delivered by proper English people. İbrahim despised phrases like ‘I figured’ and ‘That sucks’ and refused to watch any Hollywood films on principle; previous exposure to the movie genre had instilled in him a hatred of actors like Tom Cruise and other prominent examples of the American Uncouth. İbrahim reminded me of my old-fashioned English grandfather, and yet here was an earnest nineteen-year-old Turkish boy, unshakeable in the charmingly snobby literary convictions which he had picked up from a childhood of reading English classics. He applied his pedantic rigour to Latin, demanding etymological explanations for all new vocabulary and asking expansive questions about the rule of Augustus. The rest of the class found him a great nuisance, as did I on occasion, but he kept us all on our toes, and actually I think he overdid the smart Alec act to prove a point – he had an intellect, and he wanted to feed it. İbrahim was a shining exception of curiosity and individuality among a class of clever young people dulled by their Dickensian school years.
At school I studied Hard Times, and thanked my stars that the likes of Mr Gradgrind, the fact-obsessed schoolmaster, and Bitzer, the chillingly well-informed teacher’s pet, were a thing of the past. In Turkey, they are not. Dickens describes the young victims of Utilitarian education as ‘little pitchers to be filled up with facts’, and this is a disturbingly apt metaphor for Turkish schoolchildren, uniformly grinding their way through years of fact-cramming to one exam they sit at the age of eighteen: the national university placement exam. This 180-minute exam consists of 160 multiple-choice box-ticking questions, which means the papers can be easily marked by computers; even Dickens’s gloomy exaggerations are trumped by the digital age of assessment. The Dickensian enemy of Fact is Fancy, which is equally detrimental to the Turkish education system. Imagination is an unhelpful distraction when it comes to cramming for exams – accurate memorisation and regurgitation of the correct answers is all that really matters. Turkish teenagers are so used to these methods that when it comes to university, they are firmly set to cramming mode, unused to critical thinking and almost past the point of learning anything in the spirit of discovery. I began to feel guilty whenever I taught my students anything that wasn’t on the syllabus that, ironically, I myself had set (Latin is an extremely niche subject in Turkey). I was not, in fact, teaching – I was merely talking while they looked at me as if to say: ‘Why are you wasting our time?’
Turkey’s university and high-school attendance is relatively low: 31 per cent of adults aged between twenty-five and sixty-four have earned the equivalent of a secondary school qualification, much lower than the OECD average of 74 per cent. Those who do continue, however, work extremely hard, to a prescriptive and exhaustive curriculum, and they are mercilessly examined. Turkish schoolchildren go straight from school to the dershane – a private ‘lesson house’ – to cram a few more hours of study in before bed, and these are not just the children with pushy, moneyed parents. Examinations are tough and increasingly competitive, with 1.6 million students fighting for four hundred thousand university places. The dershane exists solely for the purpose of exam preparation and has become the norm for every schoolchild, regardless of wealth. On a bus in Urfa, south-east Turkey, I met a man who worked as a caretaker for a German archaeological team. He told me about his family – his daughter was blind and, while the state helped pay for a braille teacher, he spent more than half his income on sending her and her brother to the dershane. So even though the state provides free schooling in Turkey, effectively it is not free for those aiming for university because normal school hours are not adequate to keep up with the required standard. There is a similar situation in Taiwan and Hong Kong at the moment, where parents spend disproportionate percentages of their salaries on their children’s education. It has become a sordid mathematical equation of money + extra schooling = some ambitious % increased chance of university entrance.
The Turkish dershane reminds me of my own experience of the Japanese juku, a comparable kind of cramming school which is as widespread in Japan as the dershane is in Turkey. I attended a state primary school in London, with patchy levels of teaching, especially in the maths department. Aged nine, I had a Japanese friend called Aki who was brilliant at maths, and who often declined my offers to play after school as she went to an
after-school study centre called Kumon, a hugely popular Japanese crammer now available worldwide. My parents decided this was the thing for me, and I attended, miserably, for a few weeks. Hour after dreary hour of symmetrically aligned, repetitive sums was only made worse by looking around the silent ‘classroom’ at the heads of my more studious peers bent over their individual work. Academic progress was measured by the ratio between the speed at which we could complete a page of sums and the number of mistakes we made in that page, as though we were computers of variable efficiency. Aki was, indeed, brilliant at maths, as are most Turkish schoolchildren, but at what unquantifiable, Kumon-defying cost?
There are those who accuse dershane and juku owners of excessive profit seeking, exploiting parents’ fears of their children’s failure for their own financial gain – there is almost no price a parent is unwilling to pay for their child’s education. Kumon alone is worth $650 million, and it is impossible to estimate the value of the market as a whole. There are even darker rumours circulating in Turkey about collaborations between religious dershanes and the government; it is said that the education ministry secretly feeds the answers of national exam questions to dershanes run by Islamic groups, to ensure that religious children get places at top universities. As with all conspiracy theories in Turkey, this has a high likelihood of being false. What is certain is that the market for after-school crammers is hugely profitable and, sadly, as open to corruption as any other institution anywhere in the world.