Economic reasoning and its educational forms in Turkish education system

Abstract

The neoliberal trends which have been become dominant with the 1980s caused the reconstruction of all social areas, especially economy. The World Bank who is the global actor of the neoliberal policies is the object of this reconstruction processes in especially east societies. The economic reasoning is the main subject of this processes has been tried to be hegemonic in the educational fields too. In this paper, it is tried to indicate the educational forms of economic reasoning by examining the Turkish education system after 1980’s. The economic reasoning is a thinking form which aims to price everything. Its main aim is to make fenomens suited for the pricing. In the other words, the main aim of economic reasoning is to make everything subject of market. Because material things’ weights, lengths and volumes are measurable, it is easy to make them suited for pricing. But when someone try to do the same thing for educational institutions and educational labor, it is not easy. So in this study, we tried to show how the economic reasoning deal with this problem. In other words, we tried to find out how pricing and marketization processes have been realized by examining of curriculum, private schools, autonomy of schools’ budgets, tuition fees, educational quality and performance evaluation. © 2018 by authors, all rights reserved.