Minister of National Education Mahmut Özer attended the ceremony held for the opening of Arif Nihat Asya Village Life Center in İnceğiz Village of Çatalca district of Istanbul.
Minister of National Education Mahmut Özer, referring to the placements made within the scope of the high school transition system, noted that none of the placement exams are an indicator of quality in education, and said, “In the last 20 years, problems related to education and access have been resolved, many steps have been taken regarding democratization and the OECD's PISA, which really measures the quality of education, said. researches say that Turkey is constantly improving its performance. We don't need any other witnesses." used the phrases.
“But we need to pay close attention to the indicators we have shown regarding quality.” Özer said, “LGS cannot show a performance of Çatalca. As the Ministry, we do not share the results. How do you know where LGS came from? So let's say this from Çatalca to all of Turkey. It says that for we to share data we need to have data available for that evaluation. Therefore, in some educational evaluations, we need to get rid of some habits.” said.
Stating that Turkey is at a very good point in education, Özer said, "It has such a comprehensive education system, has 19 million students, provides so much education to its children with special education needs, implements such social policies to increase access to education, and nevertheless continues to do so. There are very few countries that continuously increase their success in PISA and TIMSS, although they have grown their education system as much as they did, Turkey is one of them. Most importantly, we strive to strengthen equality of opportunity in education, that is, to ensure that everyone has the highest quality education, regardless of their region and social and economic background. This is why we are trying to strengthen pre-school education. We are trying to strengthen vocational education so that the secondary education system finds its balance. We support the professional development and personal development of the teacher, as it is the teacher who needs the most investment in order to increase the quality in education.” made its assessment.
Expressing that he believes that the quality of the education system will be much better if they work with this determination and most importantly without any discrimination, Özer said the following about the village life center project: “The village life center is actually a starting point for this. A different approach has been adopted in the education system due to the migration from the past, from villages to districts, cities and metropolises, and bussed education has come. In order to prevent those children from being victimized in the villages, our governments have put forward the bussed education system in the last 19 years to transport students to the nearest school free of charge, and all our puppies who benefit from bussed education ate free lunch every day. Now, when we look at the trends in recent years, we see that this flow has reversed. Especially after the Kovid-19 epidemic, we see that people gradually evolve from metropolises to cities, from cities to districts, from districts to villages, and the flow is reversed. At the same time, we are witnessing a critical process. In fact, not only us, but the whole world has contributed to the emergence of food, agriculture and animal husbandry as a sector as critical as energy. In fact, we have put into practice village life projects both in education and to contribute to the potential in this field so that our country, which has a very strong potential in this field, can use this potential very efficiently.”
Reminding that they started the first opening of village life centers in Samsun, Özer said, "This is the 5th village life center. The first village life center in Istanbul… the first opening of a school in Istanbul, where a very valuable poet like Arif Nihat Asya, whose name is very similar, was in love with this land, expressed his longing for these lands, and read the poems of Arif Nihat Asya, whose poems we all know. we are doing. Actually, it is a project of returning to Anatolia. Why? Because there are no more obstacles to open primary schools in villages. Because we changed the regulation. We removed the student limit. Village schools can now be opened at any desired point. This is the first step towards requesting it. As a second step, kindergartens in the villages, one of our top priority areas is to increase the enrollment rates in pre-school education. Because it is the most critical parameter of equal opportunity in education. Let me remind him on this occasion; We set out to build 3 new kindergartens. We checked the number yesterday, it was 1008. In other words, we opened 11 independent kindergartens in a short period of 1008 months, and the enrollment rates for 5-year-olds increased from 78 percent to 93 percent.” shared his knowledge.
Reminding that they have reduced the condition of 10 students in village kindergartens to 5 so that the villages can benefit from this, Özer continued his speech as follows: “Only with this small step, with the change in regulation, 1800 thousand of our children in our nearly 12 villages met with village kindergartens. Now we make one more addition to this. We are opening a public education center in villages. We have 998 public education centers in Turkey. We provide services to our citizens within the scope of lifelong learning strategy with over 3 different courses for our citizens at public education centers. Last year, the number of trainees benefiting from public education centers was approximately 5 million. In 2022, we set a target to reach 1 million citizens every month. At the end of 6 months, we reached 6,3 million citizens. In other words, we passed the 1 million target. Hopefully, we will reach the target of reaching 12 million citizens by the end of the year, and 70% of these citizens are women. We activate village life centers so that our women can become stronger, participate more strongly in employment and receive all the educational opportunities they need from their location. From now on, we will provide all kinds of training requested by our citizens, from agriculture to animal husbandry in village life centers, in coordination with our Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. Village primary school, village kindergarten, public education center…”
Noting that they will be able to spend time with young people and children in these natural environments with summer camps and summer schools in places where space is available in this way, Özer said, “Actually, these village life centers are a cultural transfer that has been talked about for years, bringing together adults and young people in the education age population in a region. It is a project that has the potential to become a very important center for A unit in our ministry will coordinate and control each village life center opened. Here we will not just make this opening and go. Which courses are held at Arif Nihat Asya Village Life Center? What is going on? We will get the report of this place every month. Because this is a very critical project for Turkey and it should be very successful. For this reason, I hope we will carry these projects to a much better point by collaborating.”
Özer thanked everyone who contributed to the opening of Arif Nihat Asya Village Life Center.
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