The media report that strong-man President Erdogan of Turkey has decided that children whose parents cannot afford private school will soon be sent to state schools, there to be educated in Erdogan’s own new ideal curriculum. They will be conscripted for his vision of what every young Turk ought to believe, including the government’s version of God and proper worship. The parents’ preference apparently will be irrelevant.
This sounds familiar; henceforth, the primary difference between the public schools in Istanbul and Kansas City will be found in the ideological curriculum that gets served to the poor. In America children get drafted for a school day that is stripped of every reference to God; their Turkish counterparts — irrespective of the parents’ wishes — will have God thrust upon them. No God versus pro-God, but in any case no choice for the poor.
No doubt Mr. Erdogan’s own religious beliefs are intensely important to him. So long as he respects others, he should be entitled to them. I only wonder how, as a complete stranger to the child and family, he feels entitled — driven — to decide for his unmonied constituents exactly what shall be taught to their children about God. Has the deity bestowed upon him the insight — hence the duty — to disempower the ordinary family, imposing upon little Muhammad the ideas provided by government strangers who happen to be in a position to enlist him for their own ideological enterprises?
How does a mind like Erdogan’s get returned to office in what seems at least a proto-democracy? I have no clue. But the spectacle of Turkey invites a similar query about America and its many Kansas Cities. Why haven’t millions of parents come to the rescue of their children by insisting politically upon relocating power in the family through some system of financial reform? Yes, it is difficult to organize parents of diverse experience, education and hopes. But there is the ballot box. Why haven’t more educated parents, especially suburban, insisted upon choice for all? After all, their own choice of residence was at least partly driven by access to a school they supposed would transmit their own culture.
I wonder whether we have our own share of Erdogans, either somehow benefitting personally from the continued servility of the poor or/and confident that whatever public school is teaching is the best ideological message for our less lucky citizens who, left to their own, might not choose it.
As for direct beneficiaries there is, of course, the union, whose members do profit from the servility of the family. And among our individual teachers there are those who repose in the reality that — short of calamity — their job will be secure. They are both protected from discharge and comforted by the predictable enrollment of children whose presence also assures the union its dues. I don’t know about Turkey, but the servility of the lower-income urban family is a great comfort to the invertebrate American teacher.
The silence of the American suburbanite is more problematic. He had choice, and he took it. Why does he so seldom emerge as its champion? He imagines, I fear, that choice is a zero sum game. If everybody has it, it will be self-defeating. Access to his own child’s school by diverse sorts of families will subvert the very qualities he paid for when he moved. Nobody talks this way, but I suspect there is no more effective political barrier to school choice. It is a state of mind both understandable and amendable; hope for change will depend upon the insight and determination of legislators for whom many alternative models of choice are available. The basic palliative for suburban fears would be the relative freedom of schools to control admissions. By relative I suggest that, in any system of choice, 10 to 20 per cent of admissions be reserved for children of lower income families — if so many apply.
Having participated in the design of many such legislative models I feel confident that, over time — with wise and patient politics — the middle class family could come better to appreciate the wisdom and prudence of well-designed school choice subsidized by government. Convincing the teachers’ union and President Erdogan may require stronger medicine. Happily the awakening of the middle class should be politically sufficient. To witness the fate of Turkish children may convince us to look in the mirror.
