From the Bosphorus: Straight - Time for a ‘Day of Learning’

Make no mistake about it, our respect for the work done in Turkey by the nation’s teachers knows few bounds. They are poorly paid, overworked and long-suffering yet undertake one of the most important tasks in society. This is much discussed everywhere and certainly a topic to which we return frequently at the Hürriyet Daily News. We do so again today, following yesterday’s occasion of the the nation’s “Teacher’s Day,” with coverage of the challenges they face. It is all but a cliche to lament the deplorable state of the teaching profession. Much needs to be done. But we will save that lament for another day.

We would advocate a different approach. We would advocate a “Day of Learning.” Not teacher. Not student. Not even educator or education. For we believe that the fundamental problem bedeviling the profession of teaching, as well as the fundamental problem handicapping our children with obsolete skills and memorized texts, is little understood. The larger but scarcely spoken challenge is that the “education” model currently in use in Turkey (and the rest of the world) is broken. To state it simply, we are trying to make an industrial era education model serve the post-industrial era. Of course it won’t work, no more than the rules for maritime trade would apply to air cargo. It’s also no wonder most art classes make students hate art.

For one, the “half life of knowledge” to steal a phrase from a Russian pedagogue, has collapsed. Once upon a time, the basics of biology learned in high school would service a lifetime. And then along came the discovery of DNA, the advent of genetic engineering, the technologies of cloning, new diseases like AIDs or swine flu... well, the biology training you got in 1975 does not prepare you to deal with this. Hence much of the current confusion about vaccines.

Education as conventionally designed is in a sense an exercise in simulation. The government’s policymakers simulate the kind of society they envision 20 or 30 years hence. Official ideologies, the rites of citizenship, the myths of nationhood, these are all to be drilled into children’s heads to make them “good citizens.” But this design collapses in a world of the Internet, when radical ideologies, alternative lifestyles and volumes of frankly scary stuff are only as far away as the nearest wireless modem.

The current model is predicated on an assumption of the passive student and an active teacher. This is nonsense in an interactive age. So is the absurdity of Turkey’s test obsession, with a test prepatory sector that consumes four times the money of the entire Education Ministry. Even the name of the ministry gives a hint to the problem, which in the original Turkish includes the word “national.” For there is very little “national” in the way a child with satellite TV, the Internet and modern mobility conceives reality.

We need to stop dealing with symptoms and start thinking about the disease.