‘You owe us a future,’ say high school students in Turkey

* Photo: Serpil Ünal

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The Revolutionary Students' Union made a statement for the press in İstanbul's Kadıköy on June 5 ahead of the high school entrance exam the day after. "You are indebted to us, you owe us a future," read the statement of the students, which was also supported by the United Struggle Forces and Workers' Representatives Council of the Labor's Force platform.

Read out by Selman Çınar on behalf of the Revolutionary Students' Union, the statement of the high school students said: 

"Since last March 11, the education system has lacked in quality more and become more inefficient with online education. Deciding to give online education during the pandemic, failing to prepare the necessary infrastructure or offer students necessary materials such as Internet, phones and tablets and bringing them face to face with several problems, the education system has once again proved its reactionarism, decay and lack of any plans for the future or anything that they can give to the youth.

Concerns for the future

"With the economic crisis, not only the education system, but the lives of us as high school students and university youth, namely millions of students, have lacked in quality. Due to financial conditions, most of us have had to take a break in our education and to work in businesses/ factories in order to sustain our lives. Most of us have suffered from psychological problems due to family pressure, most of us committed suicide due to concerns for the future and the impasse imposed on us by the system. The capitalist system is driving the youth only to a life without a future and with suicides."

Boğaziçi resistance

The high school students also referred to the ongoing protests at Boğaziçi University against the appointed rector. They noted that "the rising of the youth has been growing with the Boğaziçi resistance in these days when the economic and political crises are growing and the revolutionary situation has been making the capitalist class and fascism more afraid."

"The capitalist class has been attacking us, the youth, which is the most dynamic structure of the society," they underlined.

"Shaping curricula through religion, they are trying to poison the youth with the ideas such as one nation and one homeland, as early as the primary school onward. They are trying to corrupt and decay the youth with mafiatic organizations, religious reactionarism and bourgeois culture and to turn it into the servants of the system of waged slavery, the machines of factories and the wheels of the machines," they added further.

For academic freedom

Concluding their remarks, the high school students stressed:

"We will not be part of this system, which does not promise any positive future for the youth and is full of futurelessness, unemployment, poverty and pressure! We will fight against this system which kills the youth, women, workers and LGBTI+s. It is our call to our all fellow high school students:

"Academic freedom cannot be achieved without achieving political freedom. Let's raise the struggle shoulder to shoulder with workers, laborers, women, Kurdish people and LGBTI+s and let's come together in committees to build a new and free world together." (NÖ/SD)