Abstract:

The education system in Turkey is completely under the control of the state. All stages of the education system are determined by state officials. It is taught the same courses and syllabus all schools in the country. There are monolingual, mono-religious education system that excludes pluralism and competition. Private schools are independent of government in terms of financing, other than that, the entire curriculum and education processes are under the supervision and control of the state by favor of the Ministry of Education. The same is true for higher education institutions partly. Courses that are taught in the faculties are generally determined academic members but that is different in some faculties. For example, the institution determines the courses in the faculties of Law, Medicine and Theology. When viewed in this respect, there is very strict statist education system in Turkey. This system is based on the law on the unification of education passed in 1924. This law gives all authority for education to the government.
In 2009, the Ministry of Education launched an e-learning-teaching project named “Movement of Enhancing Opportunities and Improving Technology”, abbreviated as Fatih Project. This project that will have been finalized in the five years is the most significant educational investment of Turkey and includes all public schools in the country. When considered which the rate of private schools is about 4 percent in the education system, this is quite a big project covering almost all education institutions. With the project, 42.000 schools and 570.000 classes will be equipped with the latest information technologies and will be turned into computerized education classes named “Smart Class”. Inservice Trainings for 800.000 teachers are going to be held in order to provide effective usage of the equipments that is installed in the classes in the learning- teaching process. 25 million students will benefit from it and each one will have a tablet PC without any charges and regardless of their financial provisions.
The aim of this paper is to examine what this project will be able to gain to the education in a system having fundamental problems and a strict statism. My hypothesis is as follow: Turkish education system is in need of corporatization before equipped with new technologies. There is no any contribution of new technologies in education if there is no pluralism and competition in education system.

Keywords:

Turkish education system, statist education, syllabusism, new technologies, Fatih project.