Overcoming ‘shame’ of girls’ education

The Turkish government is paying families to ‘encourage” them to send their daughters to school to bring the number of girls in education into line with European standards. More than half of Turkey’s young female population has no schooling, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef).

In the Kurdish-dominated east, most girls are forced to stay at home, unacknowledged by society from the day of their unregistered births.

Females account for the vast majority of the seven-million people believed to be illiterate in the predominantly Muslim state. Under Turkey’s Education Minister, Huseyin Celik, this inequity is being addressed.

With the help of Unicef, about 140 000 girls aged between seven and 13 have been enrolled at school over the past 18 months. The campaign, which started in 10 towns, expanded into 53 of Turkey’s 81 provinces last year.

‘We have to persuade parents about the virtues of education,” said Celik, who sees his country’s prospective membership of the European Union as a ‘civilisation project”.

Celik recalled trying to persuade a villager from the impoverished south-east to send his daughter to school.

‘The man declared straight out that, ‘Even if you threaten to kill me, I’d say no.’ There were 60 girls in that particular village who were not in school. We sent the mufti [village chief] to tell each of their families why they should go. Now, all 60 are attending classes.”

Many girls, said Celik, are deliberately kept out of the classroom by male relatives who see education as ‘some form of shame”.

For the first time, Turkey spent more on education than defence last year, allocating about R61,9-billion to the sector. Some of the extra funds went towards ‘encouraging” parents to send their daughters to school.

‘It’s a form of official bribery,” said Celik. ‘To encourage poor people to send girls to school, we give 20-million Turkish lira [about R67,50] a month for those in primary school, and 35-million [about R118] for each child attending secondary school.”

‘European values” are at the core of the biggest overhaul of Turkish schooling since the modern republic’s creation in 1923. With 20-million pupils and students registered at primary, secondary and university level, Celik said the aim is not only to bring the system in line with European standards, but to ‘democratise and modernise it”.

Turkish textbooks, like the country’s national curriculum, are viewed as among the most authoritarian and ideological in the world. Recently, schoolchildren began being ‘taught” democracy in an effort to promote critical thinking. ‘There are 43 000 primary and secondary schools in Turkey and by the end of 2005 we want to have installed Internet connections in all of them,” the minister said.

But progress won’t be easy. Although the governing, Islamic-rooted AK party holds sway among traditionalists, cultural and religious barriers remain great. Most of the country’s 12-million ethnic Kurds do not speak Turkish.

While there is a grudging acceptance that education can benefit families economically, many fathers resist sending daughters to school because of the country’s ban on females covering their heads in state buildings. –