Kurdistan Bloggers Union

Normally I am not a pessimistic person, but wow, when I read this , I kind of have to be.
While I think that it is a wonderful idea to cleanse Turkish textbooks of their nationalist tendencies that border on promoting hatred, it will never happen. First of all, and I can definitely comment on this as I work on a college campus, it takes years for a new textbook to be written, and the majority of the time it is just changing one or two words of the old edition, and calling that a revision. While this project was very ambitious and has taken 3 years to complete their study, nothing will come of it. And I think that if a similar study were to be held in the United States, the same basic outcome would be found. Yes, textbooks need to be changed…but that could take forever…but what can and should be changed is how teachers teach. It is the duty of the teacher to go beyond the textbook, to teach the students to be critical of the world around them, and this can be done without violating any of the “rules of nationalist thought and identity” that teachers, especially Turkish ones, need to follow.

So screw the textbooks, let’s work on the teachers and see so REAL change happening.