Earthquakes are a reality in Turkey. It was a part of Turkey even when the Ottoman Empire existed. The Republic experienced three big earthquakes, which happened in 1940, 1999, and 2023. They were all big disasters and had big consequences. But we experienced the 2023 earthquake most emotionally due to social media, and we have reached an extended understanding of what happened during the earthquake. While feeling the reality of the earthquake, we also learned in what conditions the victims lived. We realized that the buildings we live in weren’t built to the required quality. The reasons for these low-cost structures sparked debate on social media. Were financers immoral or uneducated? And. How can we solve this problem: through morality or education?
In Turkey, we have an often changing curriculum, and our education system is based on memory, that’s what we learn, so school isn’t a permanent source of information for Turkish students. For example, We all had traffic lessons as children; therefore, we have traffic accidents and car crashes. Sometimes we can’t remember some basic rules about traffic and don’t obey them all the time. In conclusion, Turkish education does not provide permanent information about these kinds of daily-life based issues.
Turkish society is a deeply interwoven society, we are deeply connected with our relatives and neighbors. We always get compared with our relatives or neighbors by our parents. So a Turkish man or woman finds himself in a hierarchy at an early age. We always get controlled by our parents, so we have always been expected to have good grades, be polite, be good people, etc. Morality is a feature of a Turkish child’s daily life. By making parents knowledgeable about earthquakes, discipline, or the right income, we would raise a moral generation. In their daily lives, people are much more affected by morality than education in Turkey, because of our national identity.
In conclusion, for me, raising an ethical person is a much more effective solution than raising an educated person in Turkiye because our education system is based on memory and we can’t memorize everything forever, but ethics are permanent for a person.