The decline of Turkish schools
[Part 3]<p>A TV series in Italy titled <i>Piovra</i> depicts the one-man war of a police officer on the italian Mafia.  In the second season of this movie appears Laudeo, with his cultural organisation <i>Itala</i>, with secret political and business agenda.  This is what the Gulenist organisation is.  They generated capital from participating individuals as a religious non-profit under Fethullat Gulen, and used that capital to form a widespread network of educational institutions, exploiting ultimately the centralised exam system of Turkey for university qualifications via private preparatory courses, and managed to raise hundreds of thousands of supporters and place them in most important statal institutions, and until recently, they continually expanded their influence on Turkish politicans and politics.  With the openly right-wing and popular government of AKP from 2002, they gained more and more power, siding with that party, which included many individuals member of both organisations.<p>The last coalition of Turkey had to deal with the 2000 crisis, with the very popular scene where the then president Ahmet Necdet Sezer threw a book of constitution at the then prime minister Ecevit.  AKP was quickly formed during the last months before the elections, attracting many important and popular figures from many right wing backgrounds, and in 2002, they managed to become the sole governing party.  I vividly recall how embarassing it was to be an AKP supporter those days, nobody openly admitted to supporting them.  They were so unpopular and covertly popular at the same time.  The EU agenda of Turkey failed, the laicist and free-thought agenda failed, the secular Turkish assimilation project failed, and the Turkish identity was really in crisis.  Education, under this new government, became a tool to produce AKP voters and a source of cash mainly for the Gulenist organisation through their <i>dershane</i>s (supplementary courses for preparing lycee students to the centralised university admission exams).  Frequent modifications to the education institutions, misuse and frequent modifications of relevant laws, agenda-bearing curricula, economical failure, insufficient funding, all fed a fast demise of all the Turkish schools in all levels.  Furthermore, both the Gulenists and AKP supporters were penetrating the important positions of all schools and of all the education system in general, turning each of them into a political tool.  The facilities was laid for such exploitation by the &#x27;80 coup, and the &#x27;82 constitution, which left no liberties to the universities, and centralised all their management.  Meanwhile, AKP managed (and still manages) to maintain and enlarge its supporting base with it&#x27;s faceless Realpolitik, adapting to every change, and exploiting every soft spot of the conservative majority of the country.  The little support for competing right-wing parties melted away because they couldn&#x27;t make it to the parliament, as a  election treshold is in effect, again thanks to the &#x27;80 coup.  The Wikipedia page on the topic has this relevant and interesting quote [1]:<p>&gt; Turkey, 2002. All five parties that passed the 10% threshold in the 1999 elections, as well as two other major parties, failed to pass the threshold in 2002, rocking Turkish politics to its foundations. Notably DYP got 9.55%, MHP got 8.34%, GP got 7.25%, DEHAP got 6.23%, ANAP got 5.13%, SP got 2.48% and DSP got 1.22%, all falling below the threshold. In total, 46.33% of the votes, i.e. 14,545,438 votes were unrepresented in the parliament.<p>During the &#x27;00s and especially the first years of the second decade of the 21st century, the face of Turkey&#x27;s already decadent academy was changing, Gulenists, AKP supporters, conservatives, fundamentalists alike were invading the academic institutions.  Free thought and academic research was being opressed, cencored; and brain drain was continuously increasing.  Then came the Gulenist coup attempt, and a widespread purge of the Gulenists, which affected academia and schools in general too.  The lycee system was dependent on the dershane, which were being purged, the students were being forced into religious lycees or vocational ones, the curricula was becoming diluted, all the focus was on the numbers of students graduating, all the bright minds were subject to oppression.  All this was already happening since years before the coup attempt, but with it, the government now had (and has) the means to openly attach whomever he wants.  The Turkish education system is becoming a chore that one has to endure, and people want to send their kids to do even the highschool abroad.  Nearly everyone with the means and without a zealous brain is either has left already, is trying to leave, or considering leaving.  Turkey, in its path to becoming an authoritarian regime with an agenda for the individuals mind, is becoming more hostile every day to intellectualism and culture.<p>This is very related to the tech&#x2F;IT industry, which suffers in Turkey from brain drain, as most of the IT laureates, knowing they can work abroad and live a happier life in a freer and saner society, leave.  Apart from some leading companies like Turkcell, most IT enterprise has to make do with sub-par tech staff.  And the fact that we&#x27;re rolling into a whirlpool of an economic crisis does not help:  $1 is ~₺3.5, €1 is ~₺4, and buying power of an average Turkish citizen is rapidly decreasing.  Heavy taxation, corruption, and failing industries are trying to be hidden behind Mussolinian construction projects, and faux statistics.  We&#x27;ll see...<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Election_threshold#Notable_failures_to_reach_the_threshold" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Election_threshold#Notable_fai...</a>