THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS IN TURKEY

"A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions."
~ Anonymous.

According to Bianet, the International Labor Organization (ILO), reports that a lot of kids in Turkey are working too many hours per week, especially the girls:

According to the report, Turkey is the third among the sixteen countries studied in terms of the hours that child labourers work. Only following Mali and Senegal, girls in Turkey aged 5-14 work around 30 hours a week, while boys work over 25 hours.

The average for the sixteen countries is 20.2 hours for girls and 19.2 hours for boys.

According to 2006 data, around one million children in Turkey are working.

[ . . . ]

A report published in Turkey on 11 June, produced by the Educatino Reform Initiative (ERG), there are 220,000 children aged 6 to 13 who are not registered for education in Turkey. Of these, 130,000 are girls, and 90,000 boys. Around 100,000 of the children not being educated are from central Anatolia and the southeast of the country. In addition, there are children who are not even registered as born, and have thus not been counted.

If a household is attached to a social security institution through work, this increases the probability of a child attending middle school (years 6-8) by 15 percent. However, around 54 percent of urban families have no steady income. This rate is at 84 percent in Gaziantep and 91 percent in Diyarbakır, in the southeast of the country.

At higher levels of schooling, the number of girls drop. While there are 96 girls to every 100 boys in primary 1, there are only 91 girls in 8th grade.

According to the child labour report of the Turkey Statistical Institute (TÜİK), six percent of Turkey's 6-17-year-old population is working. 66 percent of these are boys, and 34 percent girls. 41 percent work in agriculture, 28 in industyr, 23 in trade and 9 percent in the service industry.

Come on, now; it's been like this since agriculture arrived in Anatolia about 11,000 years ago. It's tradition! You can't just go messing with 11,000 years of tradition.

Besides, if you let the girls go to school, they'll get all uppity and stuff and might turn out like Eren Keskin or Emine Ayna, or Sebahat Tuncel, or Aysel Tuğluk, or something. Or they might get crazy ideas like the one that says they can shoot an AK47 just as well as the boys and then you'll have them all running off to the mountains like our guerrilla comrades, or something.

Besides, ignorance is bliss, right? Right??