What secular rite of passage is being performed here? Ask anyone at the 24 May event and she or he will say that the test is not just any test. The official name of it is the Private Selective Middle Schools Examinations (Özel Okullar Sinavi) (hereafter, “SMSE”). The test is created, organized, managed, monitored, scored, and recorded by a test unit within the Ministry of National Education (Milli Eitim Bakanhi). Of all the ministries of the Turkish state, only the military bureaucracy has an equivalent standing. Education was viewed as the foundation of the republic and its modernizing aspirations.
Why are parents so anxious? A child can take the test only once, and that one time must be in fifth grade between the ages of eleven and twelve. Istanbul is a large, busy, and noisy metropolis. It would not be unusual to get caught in traffic, for a child to be sick that day, or for parents to have their own problems or obligations that required them to be elsewhere. If the child has an anxiety attack during the test, a need to relieve her- or himself, or any other conceivable act, there is no recourse. No second chance. To underscore this point, middle school graduates who choose to take the annual national University Entrance Examinations and fail may retake them numerous times.
What is the significance of this event to the families that participate in it? Winning this race (yan) means more to them than anything else. When we ask why, they repeatedly offer the same comment that “education in Turkey has an absolute value.” But why the test, when public schools and many private schools do not require it? Winning this race, they say, means the chance “to have a comfortable life.” Parents, when pressed to clarify their gloss on our query, respond by saying that “we want our children to have the life we have, but in Turkey today it is more difficult.”
Who participates and who does not? Its scope is nationwide, but only a small fraction of eligible families choose to enter the SMSEs. Nearly a million children were eligible in 1996, but only three hundred thousand students competed for less than five hundred Anadolu middle schools in 1996. About seventeen thousand children competed for several hundred private middle schools that together had only nine thousand seats to fill. The spatial distribution of elite schools is extreme. The difference between the two types of selective schools—public Anadolu and private schools—index a class difference between the families of the core middle class and the new middle class. Private schools are beyond the economic capital of core middle-class families, and private schools are clustered in a few urban centers where the neoliberal economy is visible on the landscape. The center of elite education is Istanbul, where demand is the greatest and the competition has become fierce.
By standards of Istanbul core middle-class earning power, tuition and costs of sending a child to a private school are exorbitant to the point of eliminating middle-class families from competing in the private SMSEs. Cost of education for families increased above inflation steadily during the 1980s and 1990s, at a time when new middle-class families were joining the ranks of the established Istanbul upper middle class.
Upper middle-class families of Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey have sent their children to elite private foreign schools since the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923. The new private schools that appeared after 1980 are a response to the appearance of new middle-class families and their aspirations. The emerging new middle class was on its way to achieving a collective interest in intergenerational accumulation and social reproduction by means of education that would reflect not only its education aspirations but also its claim to new economy jobs, class privilege in the eyes of the neoliberal state, and an emerging postmodern consumer lifestyle that transformed the appearance and space of an Istanbul metropolitan region.
The tale told at the beginning of this Introduction gets underneath structural issues that occupy the early chapters of the book and foregrounds subjectivities and sensibilities of the agents of class reproduction viewed through the lens of the selective middle schools examinations.
Prior to 1980, the Ministry of National Education was hostile toward private education of all sorts, which it viewed as an attack on the foundational principles of the republic and the role of education in creating a national culture by inculcating the duties of citizenship. The introduction of the test in 1983 was close enough to parents' memories of their own childhoods free from the demands that the state was now imposing on their children. They watched their neighbors and friends as the test became more competitive with each passing year and the annual cost of private education began to outpace inflation. Their anger went beyond the test per se to how preparation for the test affected the education of their children, a loss of childhood, and a disruption in their daily lives. Parents perceived the test negatively, as an instrument designed to eliminate all but a few. The tension between a belief in the necessity of the test and its violent intrusion in the lives of the family shaped their narratives of parenthood and childhood. 1
The organization of the book addresses questions about the relation of education hierarchies to class hierarchies, the role that the neoliberal state and market together play in shaping class formation through education, and the agency of families in reproducing their own class privilege and values.
Remarkably, after 1980, especially during the decade of the 1990s and continuing into the present, there have been increases in private investment in schools at all levels of education, large enough that the government declared private education to be a new economic sector in national accounts. During this same period, Istanbul public education had reached a crisis of overcrowded classrooms, a shortage of teachers due in part to poor salaries, and a decline in quality (kalite) education. The public education crisis in Istanbul was partly due to population pressure after three decades of in-migration to cities from other provinces. Istanbul was the main destination of migrants from all provinces in Turkey. Other cities experienced in-migration primarily from provinces within their own region. The centripetal force of Istanbul in the context of class and education is made visible in an Istanbul population that has increased from one million in 1950 to ten million in 2000.
The global phenomenon we focus on in Istanbul is the appearance, over the past several decades, of new middle classes in globalizing cities around the world. These urban new middle classes, it is argued, are the social outcome of the policies and practices of states that have embraced a cultural ideology of neoliberalism and an economy of neoliberal markets. The result is an increase in the complexity and growth of new markets that have generated capital growth of all kinds—material, social, and symbolic-cultural. In the history of accumulation, we live at a time when the current scope, size, and rate of accumulation has restructured the relation between state and citizen, one social class and another, and raised questions about access and equity. The education of new middle classes in many countries is viewed by neoliberal states as human capital that has a price in the market and contributes to growth in the new economy. 2
This book is an exploration of the question, how does the Turkish neoliberal state shape its economy and culture to form a new middle class, and how does that class reproduce itself? By default, we indirectly address the decline of an industrial core middle class. Ours is an ethnographic case study that focuses on Istanbul, Turkey's globalizing city.3 We argue that fields of competitive relations, primarily in education and property, but also lifestyle, are among the most important fields to interrogate.
In Turkey, the neoliberal state and market are institutionalized sources of agency that realize the (neoliberal) new middle class as an emerging global middle class. The Istanbul new middle class, we argue, is the expression and result of the neoliberal state's elevation of the private market over other institutions that were deemed important during the previous era of building a nation through the instruments of a welfare state economy based on state enterprises. We refer to the middle class of this era as the industrial core middle class. The neoliberal state, we argue, through the exercise of its hegemony over social spaces, class privileges, and access