Disparity in Turkish Education

I have several friends in Istanbul, who are educators of various kinds. One friend works in a public school which is run by the city. She is an English teacher, though her English is admittedly not that good. When I asked her about her work she explained to me that she mostly uses textbooks and that the children, 5th graders, will work independently correcting sentence structures and filling in missing vocabulary words. When I pointed out that this completely ignores the two most essential forms of the English language, speaking and listening, she giggled and said, “Those aren’t possible in my school.” Confused, I pushed the issue further. “What do you mean? How can you have an English class without speaking?” She responded, “I do speak to some, but most of them don’t hear me even when I do. I have classes of around 70 students. I mostly just try to keep them in their seats and prevent them from poking each other with pencils.”

Fortunately for some, there is an alternative. Private schools have become increasingly popular in Turkey and learning English has become a very important part of their agenda and a globalizing world. These schools strive insist on hiring native English speakers whose wages are generally 30-50% higher than their Turkish counterparts. I had the opportunity to visit one of these schools recently. I entered a building that looked like a wealthy plantation home through 20 ft freshly painted white colums. The entry closer resembled a Las Vegas hotel reception than a school with its marble floors, atmospheric lighting and molded ceiling. I was given a tour of the grounds which included a beautiful olympic sized swimming pool and gardens. The multimedia center included computers for each student which could be used for English listening labs. The staff included 9 English teachers, 4 of whom were native for a student body of 1000. Each teacher was issued their own laptop by the school and provided with ample working space in a shared office with plentiful supporting materials. I was also informed that each year the students would take a trip to a different country to suppliment their English education. Last year they had visited the European Parliment in Brussels.

I was absolutely dumbfounded at the stark contrast between the two situations that I had encountered. Even more so by the fact that the students coming from either institution were somehow expected to compete with one another in the future job market. It seemed nearly impossible that an average coming from the public sector could ever hope to work hard enough to compete with an average student who had had so much of an advantage, but it seems impossible that such a highbrow education could be made available to the masses without a drastic restructuring in the countries education system and the funding that it receives.