The final blow to education

Feray Aytekin Aydoğan

In the past, during street performances, acrobats would walk tightropes while pickpockets distracted the crowd by drawing their attention to the acrobat and emptied their pockets. Over time, this method became an idiom meaning “to deceive people, divert attention, manipulate perception.”

For months now, religious orders, MÜSİAD, the political power, and foundation-funded organisations have spoken with one voice, saying the duration of education should be shortened. While there are dozens of problems in education and while they themselves are the source of these problems, the target declared guilty is not the quality of compulsory public education but its duration. Once again, they are applying the “look at the acrobat” tactic.

We first saw that this step targeting the right to compulsory, secular, public education would be taken in the government’s 12th Development Plan (2024–2028), published in December 2023. In the same plan, we also saw that the curriculum would be changed, and that the Teaching Profession Law and National Education Academies designed to create the government’s teachers rather than the people’s would be implemented.

THE CULPRIT IS THE DURATION OF EDUCATION!

Right after the Development Plan was announced, the strategy they have applied for years was put into action. Structures that support the political power’s policies began, one after another, to organise workshops and make statements on compulsory education. The destruction created in secular, equal, free, quality education, the rights taken from children and young people in the name of savings in education, the rise in school dropouts were no problem for them. The problem, the culprit, was the duration of education.

Before we talk about what they aim to do with the compulsory education debate, let’s ask this question. In the last 23 years, with every step they took in the name of change in education, did children, young people, teachers, parents, our country gain or lose?

Would a political power that has created such a great wreck in education carry out a change on education that puts the benefit of children, young people and social good at its core?

Now let’s look at the arguments set out in the reports and statements they have prepared on compulsory education.

ONLY PRIMARY LEVEL

The first argument was that compulsory public education and the budget allocated to it were a burden on the state, a major expense, and the state should be freed from this burden. The duration of high school should be reduced, secondary education should no longer be compulsory, and flexible, part-time school models such as factory-school, school without cram courses, and mosque-school should be implemented. Not only high school but also middle school should gradually cease to be compulsory, four new school models and vocational middle schools are part of this project and most schools should be transformed into vocational schools that could provide capital with a young labour force. The state should provide compulsory education only at the primary level.

Education was to be planned in a way that made the “stakeholder” role of capital groups and sect structures that had become corporatised under the guise of foundations and associations even more inclusive.

CAPITAL'S NEED

The second argument was that the length of education prevents capital from getting cheap labour at an early age.

The third argument was that the length of education stops people setting up a home and raises the marriage age.

The age group in question is school-aged children under eighteen.

In short they say education should be removed as a public right. It should become a commodity accessible for a price. Capital needs cheap labour early on, child labour. Education and enrolment policies should be structured accordingly. The state and Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı should largely withdraw from responsibility for children’s and young people’s right to public education and leave the education field ever more to capital, private school owners and foundationised sect structures. At the same time as the Family Year and after dozens of steps that have lowered the marriage age to as low as 12, the marriage age should be reduced in some way.

Preparations are under way for the construction of an "education" suited to the new regime. If we cannot stop the destruction planned for secular, public education under the heading of compulsory education duration, the reality we will face will be the complete removal from children and young people of the secular, public education right that will have been left with only crumbs. The reality we will face: thousands of new child workers, more children dying in workplace accidents, thousands of new child marriages. The reality we will face: a country left without a future.

More unity, more struggle, more solidarity. For our children, young people and our country.

Note: This article is translated from the original article titled Eğitime son darbe, published in BirGün newspaper on October 7, 2025.