 Is entering school at 7 years old too late?
I hate to say this, but I was the one who learnt the alphabet and began to read before I
went to primary school. This was not all: I used to wake up early every morning with my
sister, wear a school uniform and go to school with her, and then come back home. What
kind of love it was towards education that saw me up early to see students and the singing
of the national anthem. I wish I could turn back to that time and sleep in my warm bad.
The next year when I began primary school as I was by then, 7 years old, I was feeling
that I was cleverer than the others, since I used to come to school in the previous year
and learned how to read. This was a very terrible assumption that kept me sleeping for
many years; I thought that I knew everything, until I crashed into the wall of tough math
problems, very detailed geography, history of the Ottoman Empire and many other things.
Have you realized that all teachers in primary schools and universities say, "we
missed something on the syllabus, we are behind, we have to catch up with the
schedule!" At age 12 my brain became heavy as we were always in a rush to catch up
and accomplish everything on our syllabi. What the education ministry cannot take into
account is, we are human beings and learning very detailed geography, e.g., which shore
has what kind of mountains and where tobacco grows, as well as the history of wars and
peace in addition to the Ottoman Empire's establishment, rise, regression and vice versa,
plus very tough Math and some foreign languages, should not fill up every hour of our
childhoods. Nothing has changed; if the age to begin falls below 7 years old, this system
means nothing good to me. I wish that I did not go to school every morning at age 6,
before I was actually required to go.
The new campaign of the AÇEV "7 years old is too late" is being
promoted. According to research, people who do not begin education before 7 years of age
(not like my homemade education), have problems with mental, emotional, social and
physical development. For these reasons people who have no education before age 7, tend to
have a hard time continuing education successfully. Research does not lie, but hopefully,
when education before age 7 becomes mandatory, I hope the system, which means to me
"unnecessary information overload," will not create monsters who think that
geography is about memorizing what mountain is parallel or vertical to the shores and what
kind of climate figs need to grow instead of knowing where they are, where countries are
and what kind of climates those countries have. I am not saying those are necessary, but
really does anyonemanage to keep those facts in mind given how many years school syllabi
included them?
Young minds are filled with so many unnecessary things using an unsuccessful system to
keep everything in mind and as a result, we become too reluctant to learn. As if this were
not enough, we have an ÖSS exam devised to check if we have learned all of the
information or not. This makes us little competitor horses from age 7. I am against
education before 7 years old; it is absurd to make children wake up at 7 o'clock in the
morning, push them to the school with their uniforms on and sleepy eyes and fill the
little human beings up with information. I'd rather they play games or watch cartoons
instead of being educated in this system, for no doubt they will at least be better at
being socialized and learn about real life.
Gülay Acar (COMD/IV)
howtoreachgulay@yahoo.com
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