Biggest share of 2023 budget goes to education: Erdoğan

ANKARA

The Turkish government will allocate the biggest share of its annual budget in 2023 to education, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Nov. 7.

“When we assumed the responsibility to govern our country 20 years ago, we promised to raise Türkiye upon four main pillars, and we placed education at the top,” President Erdoğan said at the “2000 Village Life Center Opening Ceremony.”

“We have delivered on this promise in the past 20 years, as has been the case for every other promise we made. In every budget we prepared, we have allocated the greatest share to education,” he added.

The government has increased our annual budget for education from 7.5 billion Turkish Liras to 304 billion liras in 2021, Erdoğan said.

“The resources allocated to education in our 2023 budget, which are currently being negotiated, reach 651 billion liras in total,” he added.

With a total of 750,000 new appointments, the government has increased the number of teachers to over 1 million, catching the OECD average in the number of students per educator, the president said.

They have strengthened equality of opportunity in education by meeting all the basic needs of the students from textbooks to supplementary resources, he said and added, “Instead of ideological education that formats students, we reasserted the liberal model that aims to discover the talents of our children.”

The government has provided the children with the opportunity to learn their values from an early age with elective courses, including the Qur’an, he emphasized. “While some were preventing our girls from going to school for reasons that smelled like fascism, we removed these barriers at all levels,” he added.

“None of our achievements have been handed to us on a silver platter. We as a nation and country have had to strive, sweat, and even pay a price – when needs be – for all our accomplishments. Out of a country of poverty and economic crises, we have built a Türkiye whose economy stands out with its industry, exports, tourism and agriculture,” President Erdoğan stated.

Noting that the Century of Türkiye project constitutes the framework for the country’s goals for a new era, Erdoğan said: “The architect, author and the master of our Century of Türkiye dream is our 85 million citizens.”

“Our 20-year-long experience in democracy and development reforms lay behind our ability today to discuss the Century of Türkiye as opposed to crises,” he said.