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In this Oct. 9, 2012 file photo,
elementary school students take
a university preparation course in the
eastern province of Kars. (Photo: Cihan)
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The fate of schools offering supplementary courses to assist students with high school and university exam preparation has become a hot topic in Turkey, following remarks by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Sept. 9 that course providers would either be turned into private schools or closed down in 2013. The announcement sparked heated debate among the public, primarily educators and representatives of preparatory course providers who argue that the courses are vital to the Turkish education system, which suffers from various deficiencies.
A Twitter campaign was launched by sosyalmedya.in, a social media monitoring website, to measure the reactions of the public to the government's plan on Monday night. A total of 187,362 Twitter users, most registering dissatisfaction with the government's plan, posted 1,672,477 tweets on the issue, making it one of the top trending topics worldwide. However, the sosyalmedya.in website could only archive 1,249,477 of the tweets, as Twitter's application programming interface (API) could not support the volume of tweets. The remaining 423,000 tweets were not archived by the website.
The tweets ranged across a broad spectrum of issues. While some tweets offered insights into the prep schools and reasons why they should not be closed, others ridiculed the plan.
A number of Twitter users presented, and extensively discussed, hypothetical scenarios resulting from the closure of the preparation schools. These most commonly related to the lack of equality of opportunity in the educational system without the course providers. Most of the Twitter users agreed that if the prep courses were removed, students from financially disadvantaged families may not be able to gain access to Turkey's outstanding universities. Many emphasized that students from wealthy families would be a step ahead, having the ability to access supplementary educational services, such as private tuition, to prepare for the university entrance examinations.
In one tweet, a user says: “If the university prep schools didn't exist, students receiving education in private schools would outpace students studying at public schools easily and would gain access to Turkey's best high schools or universities by preparing for tests with private tutors.”
Another Twitter user posted: “If the university prep schools didn't exist, I wonder how many students from Hakkari, Muş or Van would study at university.”
According to another: “If the university prep schools didn't exist, it most probably would be impossible for me to gain access to the department of international relations, Boğaziçi University.”
A remarkable tweet post by a user from the eastern province of Tunceli reads: “If the university prep schools didn't exist, I would go to the mountains [to join the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)] instead of being an engineer.”
Dershanes (prep schools) are places where students pay for extra lessons to supplement the regular school curriculum. At most schools, there are 40 hours of lessons a week, while dershanes offer around 15-20 hours of lessons weekly. In Turkey, most middle and high school students attend dershanes while preparing for exams that will decide which high schools and universities they will be eligible to attend. The extra cost to parents for the courses can be a huge burden for middle class families, with many required to cut costs in other areas to raise the money for their children to attend.
The debate over the elimination of dershanes is not new in Turkey. State officials have considered such plans before, but words have never previously turned into action.
Educators say the elimination of the schools may seem like a potential relief to parents, but that such a plan inevitably brings with it multiple questions, such as whether the removal of the schools is an achievable goal in the short term and whether the government will make changes to the exam system after the course providers are closed.
Published on Today's Zaman, 13 November 2012, Tuesday
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