Zübeyde Kılıç, chairman of the Education and Science Workers Trade Union (Eğitim-Sen), warned that the academic year 2009-2010 starting on 24 September will open with a load of problems that have accumulated over the past years. Kılıç urged the Ministry of Education (MEB) to take urgend and radical steps to resolve the problems that make both the studendts and the staff suffer.
Eğitim-Sen identified the problems for the current academic year in their annual report which will also be announced to the public.
"The right of education has been cancelled"
Kılıç explained: "The problems are quite extensive. But the core problem is that neither education nor its funding is considered a basic right in the constitution. Education has become like a capital being delivered to any market player. It has become a service only delivered to the ones who can afford it".
Kılıç names further problems in education as follows:
Insufficient budget: The low budget allocated to education by the state is another problem. Even though it seems as if the numbers have increased, we can say that during the term of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) the proportion as actually decreased during the last years. This is particularly important for solving problems regarding the physical supplies and the infrastructure of education.
Content: Another problem is that the educational content became increasingly conservative during the term of AKP. While education is rapidly moving away from democracy and secularism, the capitalist logic works out its own curriculum. We also have to consider the problem of continuing compulsory religious education despite existing court decisions. Those courses are concentrating on religious books as a product of the government's ideological approach.
Regional differences: There is a crucial difference in the level of education between different regions, the provinces within these regions and the schools within the provinces. The reason for this is the fact that the schools are being left alone. If the government and the Ministry do not allocate sources to the schools, they return to their own resources, which are the parents.
Economic crisis: Since the schools lack a proper budget, the parents who are contributing with their own resources become victims of the economic crisis. The crisis also seriously affects the education of the workers.
"The Ministry should talk to the unions to solve the problems".
One additional problem Kılıç mentioned is a number of 250,000 contracted and paid teachers still waiting to be appointed.
Kılıç's proposal aims at a secular and democratic content of education, calls the Ministry to contact the unions for the development of this process and demands a separate budget for education. (BÇ/VK)
