From Classroom to Barbershop, Turkish Immigrants Struggle to Stay in School

The immigrant children brought up in this small Turkish district had only one way to free themselves from their gloomy neighborhoods. Education, especially higher education, promised them the life their parents had hoped to find in Turkey. However, the economic status of their families, their limited knowledge of Turkish and the inability of the education system to adapt to and integrate these children of diverse backgrounds presented serious problems. Against these odds, success—for all its allure—remained out of reach for many.

The economic status of the immigrant families was never certain during their first years in Turkey. Since these families came largely from rural areas, where bodily labor was required to work the land, they were fairly large. After the migration, however, there was no land to be worked and steady sustenance was difficult to find. No permanent employment was available either, and the occasional temporary jobs that the immigrants could find did not pay well. “After the first few months, there simply wasn’t enough money to send all of us to school,” Nuriye Koc told me with welling eyes. She was the oldest of six siblings, and—even though education was relatively cheap—buying enough books and notebooks strained the family budget. “I dropped out without telling my father, and begun working in a textile workshop,” she continued. There she would work six days a week for two years straight, secretly handing her paychecks to her mother to help with the expenses.

For other families, the economic hardships weren’t as severe as they were for the Koc family. They managed to keep their children in school, but this did not constitute an end to their troubles. The preceding decade’s assimilation campaign in Bulgaria had driven Turkish from the public space and reduced it to a household language. The children who had been educated in Bulgarian now faced a huge language problem, since they did not know enough Turkish to understand the subjects being taught or even enough to express themselves. “I could hardly put together a sentence in Turkish when we first arrived,” Hilmi Isik began telling me when I asked him about the language problem. He even recalled an occasion when he was accused of cheating because he could not explain how he had solved a question in a mathematics exam.

“The trouble with the school was that it didn’t want to see that we were different.” Arif Sasmaz told me when I asked him why he had been kicked out of high school, his words emerging over the rhythmic movements of his scissors as he cut my hair. He provided a valuable insight into the most acute problem the immigrant children faced in their education. These children had left behind everything they had founded their lives upon, and were trying to start anew in an alien environment. However, the schools failed to orient themselves to integrate these children and instead judged them against standards which they could not have been expected to meet. Sasmaz had a hundred stories to tell about the history teacher who failed him three years in a row by refusing to understand that he had not studied Turkish History before. These ‘failures’ drove some children to become withdrawn, but still others were incited to rebellion, and Sasmaz was one of them. “I kept getting into fights with the literature teacher, because he corrected my pronunciation of every single word. Finally one Tuesday afternoon I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

Sasmaz’s tale is striking, but it is by no means an exception. While a determined few of the immigrant children plowed through to success, the majority failed to surmount the difficulties and still live in or around the immigrants’ districts. Sasmaz himself runs a barber’s shop across the street from his home, where his former classmates—and fellow drop-outs—are dedicated customers. The mood grows somber every now and then as they talk about their school years and the accomplishments of the few who managed to get a university education. They have grown to accept their lot over time, however, and that lot has improved greatly. Nonetheless, the pains and disappointments of their youth are still visible in their eyes when they begin talking about the education of their children, and their fear that they too, might have to undergo the same hardships to earn even a basic education.