Abstract
The Politics of Education in Turkey: Islam, Neoliberalism and Gender closely analyses the transition from a republican to a political Islam structured education system in Turkey. The author, Zühre Emanet, who is also an English teacher by profession, conducted ethnographic fieldwork for over a year in two different public schools in a multi-ethnic working-class district of Istanbul. The main aim was to pursue what the author calls the ‘lived culture’ (p. 2) and ‘the structure of feelings’ (p. 76), two concepts proposed by the cultural critic Raymond Williams. A focus on how policies develop and appear on paper might fall short of capturing the ways in which policies unfold and reproduce themselves in everyday life and in people’s minds. In that sense, although the title of the book might recall a State-centric approach, Emanet’s work should be considered as an important contribution to the social history of education policies in Turkey. Enriched by in-depth interviews and participant observation, the author grounds her findings on concepts inspired by critical and feminist theory. This makes the book rich in terms of empirical material and very pleasant to read.
Apart from the introduction and conclusion, Emanet’s book consists of five main chapters. In Chapter 2, the author provides a general background regarding the development of education policies in republican Turkey. Chapter 3 shows how the initial reform initiatives of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) have marketed public education. The Party came to power in 2002. Since its early years, it has strongly followed the global neoliberal policy transformation in the field of education. This commercialisation created local education markets that made it possible for various Islamist actors, including teachers affiliated to religious sects and communities, to exert formative influence on the education sector. Chapter 4 displays in detail the implications of this new system for primary school management as well as for teachers and students. Here, Emanet’s analysis magnificently captures several ‘emergent ways of thinking’ among students who are immersed in ‘de-Atatürkification’ (p. 86). Chapter 5 puts the emphasis on the surveillance mechanisms in schools and demonstrates their ‘disciplining’ roles for school constituencies. The last chapter focuses on the gender regimes that reign in the schools with a focus on co-constructing performances of femininity and masculinity.
The book certainly appeals to a broad scholarly audience from education scientists interested in critical pedagogies to political scientists concerned with explaining AKP-type neoliberal-populism. My review, however, will be limited to the gender analysis presented in the book. In that regard, I would like to underline three important aspects of the social transformation Emanet’s findings and analysis bring to the fore. These are the mobilisation of mothers as part of the School Based Management (SBM) system brought about by the neoliberalisation of education, the normalisation of a paradoxical notion of fatherhood in the formation of gender regimes in schools, and the introduction of political Islam-tainted partisanship into teaching staff policies.
The field research that feeds the analysis presented in the book took place in the early 2010s, at a time when the AKP introduced another series of controversial reforms in education. However, the book essentially shows the results of the earlier reform initiatives of the AKP government in the 2000s, which commercialised public education through the SBM project. This project has pushed public schools to seek self-financing, particularly for the provision of teaching materials and created a new field of patrons and clients, successfully dominated by different Islamist actors. However, the self-help system has not only expanded the influence of different Islamist actors over the education system. It has also relied on the mobilisation of mothers (again by several Islamist actors) as parents and on the extension of their unpaid care work to sustain the reproduction of school life. As illustrated by Emanet, on one hand, this mobilisation made it possible for many young women from conservative backgrounds to eagerly participate in the public space. On the other hand, this participation was only possible, first because of the de facto institutionalisation of gender segregation in public spaces. Second, a certain understanding of motherhood, as being fully involved in a child’s education, has both exploited young mothers’ worries and concerns about being good mothers and motivated them to increase their efforts. Single mothers who also work full time would not fit into this gender arrangement and would be regarded as ‘deviants’ (p. 134), including by teachers.
I would like to argue that these two factors – the extension of unpaid care work to the public sphere and the de-housewifization of young women through gender segregation and ‘good motherhood’ – make it necessary to reassess the public–private divide and its role in the management of neoliberal-cum-patriarchal gender orders. Apparently, this divide or separation has never been fixed in the history of capitalist social formations (Olsen, 1983). It has always acquired different historical facets (Boyd, 1997). However, in its current form in Turkey, it seems to represent the extension of several gendered features of the patriarchal private sphere into the public sphere: a rearrangement of the public sphere and its gender order in the mirror of the domestic sphere and of its inequalities.
In Emanet’s book, this is also seen in the practical and ideational conflation of the role of the female teacher with that of the mother and that of the male teacher with that of the father. Not only does this conflation reproduce gender stereotypes, but it also seems to increase the responsibilities of women teachers in terms of emotional commitment and the extra time they have to spend counselling mothers or looking after pupils. Apparently, almost no or minimal emotional commitment is expected from male teachers. In fact, this is also due to the fact that fathers are not expected to contribute to parenthood in the same way as mothers. According to Emanet, there is a significant paradox defining the approaches of the teaching staff: fathers are only expected to function as coercive figures, who can discipline the pupils through inflicting fear, and yet fathers are also not solicited as parents because many of them use violence at home. However, rather than addressing this paradox, the problem is avoided. Therefore, the book convincingly shows that instead of challenging the unequal gender order of the society, education politics that are under the impact of neoliberalisation and Islamisation reinforce and amplify the gender difference regime. At this point, however, the book does not offer the reader a positive perspective for change: how should public schooling be transformed so that it becomes a champion of egalitarian change in society? Or should education be involved in promoting progressive social change at all?
The last aspect I want to highlight is the book’s success in capturing the dialectic of reform and coercion in the microcosm of the two public schools. While problematising the surveillance and disciplining practices that target teaching staff, Emanet also discusses a significant event that challenged the formal dress code in public schools. In 2013, a teachers’ union that is known to be in a partisan relation with the government started a petition that asked for a change in the code of dress for civil servants on the grounds that the code was authoritarian in character. In reality, however, the issue at stake was not the dress code as a whole, but the ban on headscarves. The ensuing code change was also limited to the liberalisation of the veil while leaving the other repressive and gendered dress measures intact. One of the teachers interviewed by Emanet captured the Zeitgeist of this era of AKP induced changes in the field of education with the words of ‘partisan freedom’ (p. 113). Emanet underlines the difference between this conceptualisation and several other terms, such as cronyism and nepotism, which are frequently used to make sense of the authoritarian AKP rule in Turkey. In fact, while cronyism refers to a mode of buying social support, ‘partisan freedom’ underlines the selective characteristics of State–society relations established under the AKP regime. In my view, these selective reforms should have had significant implications for secular, Alevi and/or non-believing women teachers. There is some evidence in the book of the strategies of opposition/resistance developed by women teachers working in the schools that are the subject of Emanet’s research. Some of the (few) reactions discussed in the book are linked (and seemingly reduced) to nationalist Kemalism and/or right-wing Kemalism. Whether introducing a different critical lens and capturing the ‘structure of feeling’ among potentially discriminated/excluded women teachers would point to alternative emergent/pre-emergent political horizons remains an open question.
To sum up, originating from Emanet’s doctoral research, the monograph provides the reader with thought-provoking insights into the transformation of the social order under the AKP, with a focus on the field of education. Gender studies scholars would especially benefit from the rich material and conceptual horizon offered by Zühre Emanet to rethink the processes that help in the persistence and/or upgrading of patriarchal gender orders in neoliberal-populist contexts.
