President Erdoğan pledges to build 'Century of Türkiye' with teachers

ANKARA

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said they want to realize the vision of “Century of Türkiye” together with the teachers of the country.

“We will leave a more prosperous country to our children by making the next period the Century of Türkiye,” Erdoğan said on Nov. 24 addressing teachers from 81 provinces of the country on the occasion of the Teachers Day.

The “Century of Türkiye” is a new series of programs, projects and targets for development announced by President Erdoğan as the country prepares to celebrate its centennial in 2023.

The president pointed at that fact that the government allocated the biggest share of the budget for education.

“The budget allocated to education was 7.5 billion Turkish Liras 20 years ago. We have determined our education budget for the next year as 651 billion liras,” he stated.

The teachers are also the architects of a person’s character, Erdoğan said and added, “As Türkiye grew, we considered it our duty to reflect this to our teachers above all else.”

Earlier Türkiye had schools with 120-person classrooms, now the number has dropped to 20, he said.

“We have saved our schools from neglect and equipped them with the most modern facilities in every field. We have not neglected our teachers either. We strengthened our education army by appointing a total of 750,000 new teachers. We have appointed 75 of the 100 teachers currently on duty,” Erdoğan stated.

The government has designed every reform and every decision regarding education by carefully calculating the pros and cons as a result of long consultations, Erdoğan said noting that they had created the “Teaching Profession Law” as a result of this approach.

A total of 422,368 teachers were successful in the specialist teacher exam and a total of 516,974 teachers earned the right to become specialist teachers, the president said.

While 66,422 teachers were successful in the head teacher exam, 257 specialist teachers were exempted from the exam because they completed their doctorate, he said adding that including the exempted, 66,679 expert teachers earned the right to become head teachers.