On this particular Saturday morning, the structure of feeling is different. The year is 1996, the date May 24, the time an hour away from eleven o'clock. We register these precise facts because we are walking briskly in the same direction as others, with purpose. Following a multitude of parents with their children in hand, we turn off Siraselviler, one of the main streets in the district of Cihangir, and wind down Turnaci Bai Street to an elementary school that happens to be located next to the Greek Consulate. Others have already assembled. There is a look of nervousness on the faces of parents, an unusual quietness in children, and stillness in the air. We sense a feeling of apprehension, yet also single-minded determination. A few parents greet each other before turning their gaze toward the pavement or the sky, or just staring at an empty middle distance. The children are from different elementary schools, but as fifth-graders they share the same intention. There are a few older people milling about, no doubt surrogate parents. Expressionless children stand dutifully by the side of a parent or ward, foregoing an opportunity to glance at each other.
We share this structure of feeling because others like them have shared their hopes, dreams, and anxieties with us. We are there to observe, at one moment in one location, an annual event that occurs simultaneously in designated venues across the nation. We know that a large majority of the participants in this ritual are privileged children of a relatively small proportion of the Turkish population. Their families share a class resemblance, but retain many differences in their character and beliefs. Years of preparation have brought them together at the door of this school.
At precisely eleven o'clock, the heavy wooden door opens and a man steps out; without a word, he motions the children to enter. They move toward the door with a studied pace. At the door, he checks the name of each child against his list. A few parents venture a step through the doorway for one last hug, interrupted by a gesture that separates parent from child. After the last child enters, the man disappears behind the closing door. The sudden separation, we surmise, must be jarring, antithetic to the emotional closeness that develops between mother and child during their years of shared preparation and planning that have brought them to this school on this day. An hour and ten minutes will have passed before the door again opens. Inside, each child will have demonstrated the skills of speed and accuracy by answering one hundred multiple-choice questions. Outside, parents are thinking, “one chance only.”
Most of the parents are mothers, and most are equipped with cell phones. They pace up and down the street but keep the door in sight, stop, sit for a moment on old stone walls across from the consulate, nervously occupying themselves by calling close relatives, neighbors, and friends who are awaiting word—any word. The calls are repeated frequently despite the absence of any news from inside the school. Cigarettes are lit and extinguished before they are spent. Once in a while, a car shows up. The driver, no doubt a husband or close relative, confers in low tones with the mother, then drives off. This act of disappearing and reappearing seems incongruous with the emotional tone of the event. The waiting seems unbearably long as mothers glance at their watches.
Suddenly, the door opens. Children come pouring out; some are wearing smiles, others subdued. None are exuberant. Parents rush to their child, embrace her or him, lift the child off her or his feet. They are delirious with joy and express enormous sighs of relief; sighs of adult exhaustion more from the mothers than the fathers. Abruptly, every child is whisked into a car or hurried up the street to attend a debriefing at home, where close friends, neighbors, and family members await to smother the child in loving security. No doubt there will be a reward. Mothers will thank their child for working with them—another incongruity, as if the child were working for his or her mother.
Relief gives way to heightened tension in the days that follow, as parents who chose to enter their child in this national test await news of the results. Within a week, the official results are published in national newspapers in the form of long lists of identification numbers of the children, together with their numerical score to the third decimal place. The list is rank ordered, highest to lowest scores. The word is out—winners take all. Not even a second chance. Elimination. For weeks, on the front pages and in feature stories of national print media, winners reveal the names behind the numbers, and appellations of superiority are attached to them in newspapers that feature stories about “super” students that display the photos of winners, at times with their “super” tutors, sometimes their parents, but rarely with mothers, or with the elementary school teacher who taught the same child for five years. The private middle schools that are in competition with each other to select the best of the winners are themselves referred to by the press as “five-star” schools, closing the circle of symbolic capital.
Some of the most sought after middle schools in the country happen to be in the immediate vicinity of the event we observed. The oldest and most venerable school in the country is Galatasaray Lisesi (lycée), a few steps from the Greek Consulate onto Istiklal Boulevard. By a historical particularity, Galatasaray happens to be a special public school founded in the late Ottoman period as a school for training imperial pages as part of reforms referred to as Tanzimat. The school was reorganized in 1868 as a modern lycée (grades six to eleven, including middle school grades six to eight, and high school grades nine to eleven), influenced by France. Lessons were taught in both Turkish and French. A popular history of the area published in 1972 refers to the school as the “best as well as the most famous Turkish lycée.” (Sumner-Boyd and Freely 1989: 104) Today it no longer is considered the “best” school by the state or most parents, but it continues to enjoy the reputation of being the most intellectual lycée, perhaps because of its commitment to a classical curriculum.
We stroll down Istiklal Boulevard from Galatasaray Lisesi to Alman Lisesi (German) and continue on past the museum and house of the venerable Whirling Dervishes, representative of a different genealogy and pedagogical heritage. Then down the hill past Galata Tower, the center of the medieval Genoese merchant community, to arrive at Avusturya Lisesi (Austrian, middle school). Continuing our stroll along the side of the hill in Galata, we circle back around to St. Benoit Lisesi (French). Had we continued farther along the hillside we would have arrived back at Taksim Circle, where Istiklal Boulevard begins. Nearby is Notre Dame de Sion Lisesi (French).
By international treaty, private foreign schools were protected and have survived over three generations to become the most sought-after schools in the country. Most are in Istanbul, all are private, all teach in both Turkish and foreign languages, and all have acquired a pedigree that precedes the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923. To complete the Istanbul list, we include Saint Joseph Lisesi (French), Sankt George Avusturya Kiz Lisesi (Austrian, for girls), Sankt George Avusturya Lisesi ve Ticaret Okulu (Austrian), Saint Michel Fransiz Lisesi (French), Italyan Lisesi (Italian), Üsküdar Amerikan Lisesi (American), and Robert Lisesi (American). In all, eleven private foreign elite schools that together have an enrollment of only several thousand seats.
For some decades now, Robert Lisesi has been, by acclamation of media and popular assent, the “best” high school in Turkey. Founded in 1863 by an American missionary and philanthropist, in its early years it became a university that for decades was called “the finest institution of higher learning in Turkey.” In 1971, the original