I forgot to include in my review a funny scene in "3 Idiots" that
reminded me of my paper thin knowledge of Turkish. When the
pedantic villain of the movie, the dean of the engineering school,
demands that the hero define a machine, he replies it is something
that performs a labor-saving task for human beings. The villain
bawls him out, giving him a prolix definition that took 500 words
for what the hero stated in 10 or so. The dean then orders him out
of the classroom. But just before he reaches the door, the hero
tells him that he first has to get his ...., a 500 word
description of something. When the puzzled dean asks him what he
is talking about, the hero tells him a "book", which I caught in
Hindi as "kitap". It turns out that the Hindi word is kitab, very
closely related to the Turkish word "kitap" for book. The two
languages share other words, like "peynir", or cheese. This is
obviously a legacy of Mughal rule.
Additionally, the Indians and the Turks share an onerous
university exam system as well, although I am not sure it leads to
as many suicides as it does in India. Here's my review of "The
Exam" (Sinav), a Turkish film very much in the same spirit as "3
Idiots." Like "3 Idiots", it involves stealing the answers to an
exam, a plot device I should add that can be found in "Animal
House" as well:
"Sinav" is a comedy that revolves around the efforts of a group of
five underachieving high school seniors and friends to steal the
onerous college entrance exams that are the Turkish version of the
American SAT’s. While there are plenty of laughs in this movie,
there is also a serious questioning of the need for a test that
condemns those who fail it to a life of economic uncertainty. This
Youtube music video clip drawn from scenes in “Sınav” likens high
school students facing the exam to race horses competing with each
other. As they say, “They shoot race horses, don’t they.”
The first few minutes of “Sınav” consist of nightmares that the
five students have as the pressure to pass the exams mount in the
final months of their senior year. One is shown in a police
station being slapped around by cops who ask questions like “In
what year did the battle of Lopanto take place?” or “How can you
use the Pythagorean Theorem to calculate the hypotenuse of a right
triangle?” When he fails to come up with the answer, they pummel him.
At a student assembly, they meet one their high school’s most
famous graduates, a hugely successful businessman named Levent
Lemi (Okan Bayülgen), who got the nickname “No Arms” when he was a
student. He came up with the brilliant idea to fake arm injuries
so that he could wear a cast with crib notes interspersed
throughout the signatures during the exam that escaped notice from
the Principal. Even after it became common knowledge that Lemi
cheated, that did not prevent the Principal from welcoming him as
a homecoming hero. With the generous contributions he has made to
the school, it would be foolish to ostracize him, especially when
the Principal himself is using the school’s backrooms for his own
shady business deals.
The climax of the film involves the five students using cell
phones to coordinate a burglary in the school that amounts to a
send-up of films like “Oceans Eleven.” Their mastermind is Uluç
(Volkan Demirok), a short, chubby and baby-faced actor with a real
flair for comedy. When his four confederates discover that the
music teacher is in the faculty room where the tests are stashed,
Uluç calls on his cell phone and convinces her that he is a
recording executive who wants her to come down immediately to his
studios to sign a contract. Their dialog is far wittier than
anything I have heard in a Hollywood movie since “Some Like it Hot”.
As should be obvious from this report in the June 28, 2006
Financial Times, “Sınav” is dealing with serious issues while
being entertaining:
For the past couple of weeks, hundreds of thousands of
Turkish children have been sitting school-leaving examinations,
distracted by the usual baking summer heat, football on the
television and the difficulty of recalling what they have learned,
mostly by rote, in the classroom.
It is, as in other countries, a rite of passage. But in
Turkey it has a special significance, given the importance that
the state places on education – for historical and ideological
reasons as much as for the creation of a developed nation.
Some of this year’s children will be either bright enough or
rich enough to secure a place at one of the country’s 76 state or
private universities or at its leading science and technical schools.
Others will make up for the shortcomings of their state
education by attending a dershane, a cramming school that prepares
students for university entrance examinations.
For the majority, however, there is no guarantee of a
university education or a job. With up to 20m children in the
system at any one time, state education in Turkey is overcrowded,
under-funded, and uninspiring.
This is a serious shortcoming in the development of Turkey,
and also a contradiction. The state is present in every community
in this big, mountainous and difficult-to-navigate country in two
ways – a police station and a school.
Yet, until two years ago, the budget for Turkey’s armed
forces (run by the ministry of national defence) was higher than
its education budget (run by the ministry of national education).
Even if the vast majority of Turkish children get an
education, it is often rudimentary, especially in remote areas in
the east and south-east. School buildings are often drab, lacking
technological facilities and sports fields. Teachers are in short
supply.
It was only in 1997 that a compulsory eight-year basic
education was introduced. Even now, the average Turkish child
spends only four-and-a-half years in school, according to Enver
Yucel, an entrepreneur in the booming private education sector.
The average German child spends 13 years in school, he notes.
“We did something wrong in Turkey,” Mr Yucel says. “We spent
our budget in the wrong way. Turkey cannot say its priority is
education with comparisons like these. Our politicians have never
given it enough attention, just short-term solutions.
One can only add that given Turkey’s headlong rush to spend an
inordinate amount of money on the military, adopt neoliberal
institutions, and substitute Islamic charity for traditionally
state-sponsored institutions such as the public schools, things
are likely to get worse before they get better.
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