Multicultural Education Perspective in Turkey: Possibilities and Dilemmas

Abstract

The objective of this chapter is to critically analyze different multicultural education approaches in terms of their emancipating potentials. For this aim, the chapter directs its attention at the studies of multicultural education that proliferated especially in recent years in Turkey. The basic question that guides this study can be formulated as follows: Does the conceptualization of “multicultural education” in Turkey refer to an educational imagination that gives back to the cultural groups who were, because of their cultural differences, excluded from the educational field and subjected to inequalities and discrimination, the power to determine their own destinies and renders them the subjects of their own salvation? Or, does it function as the strategy of the state for governing cultural variety? The chapter, first, looks at the historical background that shapes and conditions the perspective of multicultural education in Turkey. Second, the chapter presents an outline of the multicultural education debates in Turkey and analyzes the political epistemology, on which the debates are based. The chapter highlights that in the academic discourse on multicultural education in Turkey, an abstract and vogue conceptualization of “culture” goes hand in hand with a formalist and ambiguous understanding of pluralism. In the academic discourse, a particular understanding of multiculturalism that is not pluralist, a “plural mono-culturalism” is dominant. The studies that focus on the power structures and relations that produce the cultural hierarchy are almost non-existent. The chapter argues that for Turkey the liberating potential of multicultural education can be revealed only if it is advocated within the context of radical democracy and political emancipation and autonomization.