A country’s future depends solely on the well-being of its future generations. “Protecting the homeland begins with protecting the children.” As Mustafa Kemal Atatürk says. But what is this claim based on?
First of all, let’s start by understanding what these words mean. I believe that in this case, “protecting the children” means educating them. While it could be protecting them in the literal sense, like not killing them, I do not think that it is very likely because the children will mostly continue living even though they do not contribute anything to the development of our society.
From his words, we can understand that Atatürk liked and believed in the young people of Turkey. We can also understand this from his other sayings like “All My hope is on the new generation.” and “This country belongs to you.” when he is referring to the young people of this country.
Most of the problems that we come across in today’s society can be solved with education. Littering, violence, any kind of disturbance… All of them can be solved with education when it is done right. However, doing education right is way more difficult than it seems. Education starts in the family but if the parents are not educated well, the child will also not be educated well, even in some cases the child will be educated worse than his or her parents. This brings up the question of how we can do education the right way. We can start tackling this question by first, understanding what education is and why it is important. Education is being taught new things and it is important because, without the right education, people will be useless. However, education is not memorizing a bunch of information before a test, just to forget them afterward. Education is not studying for twelve years with mediocre notes and going to a university that no one has ever heard of thinking that you will become something, or by pressure from your parents. This leads me to the idea that not everyone should study. Yes, if it was done right, the education system up until high school and maybe a little bit into high school is necessary, but not everyone should go to university. Occupations like garbage collector and farmer are also equally important in our society. If there were no garbage collectors, streets would be littered (I know that education would solve problems like this but unfortunately in every society, there are some bad apples.) and if there were no farmers, which I think will happen in the near future because farmers in our country do not receive the money that they deserve and they quit their jobs, the economy would collapse. If everyone is a university graduate, nobody is.
This also leads me to another problem, which is that education is not what we are doing right now. Education should not be memorization. When memorizing, we do not retain any information. Education should also not be learning things that will not benefit me, on a deep level. While the things that we learn in school are useful on their own, we do not choose a specialty soon enough, so we learn stuff that not everybody will use in their life on the same level.
Education should, first of all, teach us how to be human beings. Being an engineer does not matter if we think spitting on the floor in public places is okay. I think that education in kindergarten and preschool should mainly be focused on being a decent human being. Otherwise, I do not think that anything we become will matter.
When education is done right, it gets results. This has been proven time and time again, by different countries or groups that implemented different education systems. For example, Finland is widely regarded as the country with the best education system. Their system is focused on actually learning things and being a good human being. Therefore, they have lower crime rates and they are one of the happiest countries on our planet. In conclusion, it has been proven again and again that better education equals an overall better country. Atatürk was right when he said those words.