Say Yes, Spring 2005: Servet Özdemir

Ministry of National Education (MONE) General Director of Primary Education, Professor Dr Servet Özdemir speaks about child protection, the fundamental role of education within the family and how he hopes that a pilot initiative in İstanbul will hopefully be a model for ‘Catch-up’ education in Turkey.

Family training has a direct bearing on child protection because the family environment is the sine qua non for every child’s proper growth and development.

Families of limited means tend to prioritise the education of their boys. Our own shortcomings in the proper structuring and management of the system are partly to blame for this because we have to make it clear that education has concrete returns for every child. Girls benefit less from educational opportunities at every level, so MONE has various programmes that are specially designed for females. The Haydi Kızlar Okula! campaign with UNICEF is one of our priority projects. It has been instrumental in raising awareness amongst families of the financial support that is available through the government’s Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) scheme for sending their daughters to school.

The issue of street children is problematic -- one of the effects of an industrialised society. The old proverb don’t let others see your suffering is hardly relevant in today’s world. Everything is out there in the open to be seen. The increase in internal migration and a social justice system that does not support the family as much as it should means that children can become separated from their families, excluded from school, forced to live and work on the streets.

Although SHÇEK is mandated to address the issue of street children, many of these children constitute a target group for MONE as well because they are of school age. For instance, we are about to start a basic education school in İstanbul for children who are at risk.

Catch-up education is seen as a new chance for the steadily rising numbers of street children. The development of new education-training institutions such as we are seeing in İstanbul, cooperation with NGOs and the crucial involvement of the media make up our short-term strategy to provide these children with an education.

Unfortunately we don’t have enough reliable information and data on this issue. Some NGOs have introduced palliative measures that help to some degree but we’re lacking a comprehensive, systematic framework that challenges the current system, suggests improvements to the status of families and keeps children in school. The pilot project in İstanbul should provide us with some useful pointers on how we can manage this.

Catch-up Education presents an alternative for children who could not, for whatever reason, complete their basic education. It’s impossible to ensure the re-schooling of these children through the usual channels. It would be futile to place 13 or 14 year-olds with 6-7 year-olds so Catch-up Education is a good solution that will help ‘bring them up-to-speed’ in their basic education.

We need to dispense with the traditional notion that it’s pointless for families to keep their children in school after a few years of primary education. This is why compulsory education was extended to a minimum of eight years in the first place.

Schools should be protective spaces that support the mental, physical, linguistic, moral and social development of children in every respect. This nurturing process should be upheld and secured for the child in all cases and against all the odds. So we have to provide children with environments where they can live out their childhood, play games and develop their personal interests because we need our younger generation to have developed personalities, individual interests -- capable of standing up for their ideas and opinions.

Meanwhile, we need to present relevant and accessible models of schools. If we can’t come up with relevant models, if the media does not support us, it will be very difficult to build standards in childhood development.

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