Social Education in Turkey

The most important thing that reveals the advancement of social education in a nation is the condition of the individual in the roads, the streets, the shops, and the vehicles of transport — there, outside the houses, where individual struggle, perpetual movement, and constant dealings among people prevail; where the crowding grows dense and the causes of quarrel arise; there selfishness plays its part, and tempers and characters appear in their clearest form.

In the salons, however, and at banquets and parties, a man usually puts on the garb of refined delicacy and utmost courtesy; he wears his finest attire in appearance, conduct, behavior, and habits.

Here, though we may find specimens of splendid social polish, we cannot judge by them the advancement of social education among the common people.

In Turkey, apart from the high refinement you find among the upper classes, you find a rich refinement — perhaps unique — among the individuals of the people at large.

We find it among the children of the street, among the drivers of motorcars, in the tram, the automobile, and the boat, and in every place where feet crowd and movement abounds.

No driver races another driver; no child raises his voice in abuse; no children roam neglected through the quarters and alleys; no passenger disturbs his companion or shoulders his way against him to find himself a seat; no young man points to his brawny forearms, threatening and promising his fellow the coming battle.

You hear no raised voices among those who converse, no violent din among the vendors, no shouting and threatening and menace.

Nor do you see there idlers sitting on the sidewalks to play backgammon and amuse themselves.

Rather, every movement proceeds in calm and peace. And every question finds someone to answer it — answering you with a smile, explaining to you clearly, serving you with good grace, from the highest classes to the humblest.

Every stranger sometimes needs to put questions, to inquire about the landmarks unknown to him in a country not his own; in Turkey he never lacks the well-mannered answerer and the fitting guide, courtesy having lent his face a rare gentleness that invites friendliness and reassurance.

And there, on the beautiful shores of the Bosphorus, where the magnificent palaces speak the grandeur of the Sultans, woman stands beside man, in the early mornings and in the evenings, carrying her work bags, waiting to go where she works at man's side; she stands with all propriety, competence, and dignity to board the boats that ply the waters — waters which, it was said only yesterday, had swallowed the bodies of freemen and fighters.

The boats ply there, coming and going, carrying the many hundreds of working men and women, and strollers, men and women alike, of a people that has learned the meaning of freedom, whose sensibility learning and education have refined until it grew delicate and clear, in harmony with the features of beauty — the outspread beauty of nature, which no beauty surpasses.

I would contemplate the faces of the elderly women, searching among them for those who only yesterday, like their sisters in the Arab East, dragged the chains of servitude and suffered under the absurd customs that fettered all their powers.

I would examine the women's faces, hoping to see among them the heroines of "The Wretched Women," the novel about Turkish women written by Pierre Loti, the well-known French writer.

Or perhaps I might see their fellows or their kinswomen, and so remember the feeling they shared — the feeling of pain at the prevailing degradation — that grew in the hearts of the first company of awakened Arab women

in the recent past, after that same feeling had awakened in the hearts of the Turkish women, the first in the East to reach the springs of freedom and of a life worthy of honorable man.

I remember, and there rises before me, almost palpable, the vision of those hopes that were knotted amid the storms of traditions born of pitch-black ignorance — knotted and woven from the very heartstrings, to bring woman to where the call of the free and proud homeland summons her, and to where she is summoned by that independence of self which rises above absurdities and breaks free of narrow bounds.

Woman today must know that the blessing she enjoys was denied to her sister in the past — who yearned for that blessing: the blessing of freedom to learn and to work, the blessing of liberation from the conditions of ignorance, and the blessing of release from the prisons of dogmas and illusions. All she has to do today is to use this freedom well, for her own good and the good of her fellow citizens.

Roaming childhood, youth loitering on the sidewalks, shouting in throats, filth in the alleys — all this comes of ignorance and of bad individual and social education.

Every social corruption goes back to bad education. Vinet, one of the French writers, said words to this effect:

"A people is worth what its women are worth."

Indeed, thinkers are agreed that the scale of every people balances with the scale of its women in point of education and refinement.

There is no escape, then, for woman from bearing the responsibility and shouldering its burdens, now that the prisons of degradation and humiliation in which she was fettered in the past have been torn down, and the choking fog that had gathered on the horizon of her spirit has melted away.

Nothing hinders her from clearing her soul and lifting her spirit toward noble ideals, to embrace them and strive to attain them.

O woman! The holy oil is in the lamps of hearts, and they await good and true breaths from a life of honor to blaze up with light.

And the tree of education strikes its roots in the soil of the home whose mistress you are; then its branches spread out, in good or in corruption, according to the care they have received.

The best habits are first practiced by the child in the arms of women.

And high refinement does not spread through a nation if woman's every hem is not trimmed with sound taste and true love, and if her affections are not made tender with sure sympathy and with help free of ulterior motives.

Neither laws nor regulations alone reform peoples and set societies upright, unless they are supported by the powers of the individual — and behind them the hand of the wise woman, held out with polish, education, and refinement.