teacher, one a journalist who wrote an education column in a major Istanbul newspaper, and one who was a partner and administrator of a private lesson school. Nine of the parent interviews were conducted with both spouses present. In addition to taped interviews, we had innumerable informal conversations about all aspects of education with many people, educators as well as educated, over a period that spanned seven years of periodic living in Istanbul. Many of the comments and observations made during conversations found their way into a daily journal, and helped us to frame relevant topics and issues that eventually became part of the design of our interviews as well as having an influence on many other aspects of our project.
Our main interest in doing taped interviews was to accumulate a record of how families planned for the education of their children. Education plans are no casual matter. Parents begin with a plan at the birth of a child and involve a wide range of family members. We wanted their experience of their world in their words. As it turned out, this was not difficult to achieve. Working through family, friends, relatives, former students, and classmates, we were able to gain introductions to a rather wide range of new middle-class families who lived in widely separated districts of Istanbul. These introductions were invaluable, indeed necessary, to the success of our project. Had we merely selected people according to some objective criteria, the interviews would have been formal and brief. As it turned out, the interviews were lively and interactive. People had much to say about “Turkey's education system today.” They discussed and debated their differences on topics such as the immorality of the state, their own ambivalent feelings of resistance and resignation toward the national middle schools examinations, the failure of public education, the sacrifices of the family, and many other topics related to success and failure, tests and education, class and privilege. They often struggled to find language that would articulate their feelings about the lost childhood of their children and to contrast it with the memory of their own experience.
Parents had much to say about schools, education, and tests. They also placed their personal experience in the larger context of relations among family, state, and market by talking personally about administrators, teachers, and tutors. We were particularly interested in education entrepreneurs who had built and operated private schools, lesson schools, or gone into business for themselves as private tutors. We were fortunate to be able to tape interviews with several of the most successful education entrepreneurs in Istanbul in each of these categories.
In the summer of 2006, Balkan conducted follow-up taped interviews to track education destinations and compare them with families' earlier aspirations, expectations, and understandings. The information obtained from interviews as well as interviewees' perspectives on various aspects of education and testing and their importance to upper middle-class families proved invaluable to our interpretation of class reproduction by means of education.
Notes
1. During the period we conducted our research (1990–1997), the selective middle school tests were given at the end of fifth grade. In the summer of 1997, the Ministry of National Education announced the Eight Grade Reform, extending compulsory comprehensive elementary education to eighth grade. The selective middle schools test was also moved to the end of eighth grade. The test was given for entrance to selective middle schools from grades nine through eleven, at the end of which lycée graduates would prepare for and take university entrance examinations. The structure and logic of the test were unchanged, but the reform altered the dynamics and strategies of families competing in the university entrance examinations to follow.
2. Nelly P. Stromquist and Karen Monkman point out that before 1997, “globalization” has been treated primarily as an economic and technological phenomenon, not within an educational or cultural perspective. Their edited volume of essays on the intersection of education and globalization is aimed at correcting this deficit. The essay by Martin Carnoy sees at least three effects of globalization that relate to the ideology of neoliberalism: the pressure on states to reduce the growth of public spending on education, shifting the burden on other sources of funding (entrepreneurs of private schools, the wealth of families, etc.), spending on higher education because it results in graduates that produce higher returns, and a focus on quality education. For these and related essays, see Stromquist and Monkman 2000.
3. One measure of a globalizing city is its rate of growth in economic output. By this measure, Istanbul is projected to work its way into the top thirty globalizing cities by the year 2020 along with Buenos Aires, Shanghai, and Mumbai (Daneshklu 2007).
4. The painting is housed in The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 1935.
1
CLASS MATTERS
When British Prime Minister Tony Blair reputedly was asked at a press conference about the value of education in today’s global economy, he is said to have responded gamely with the phrase, “the more you learn, the more you earn.” The stakes of becoming middle class and reproducing class have risen, increasing the demand for cultural capital in the form of education. New middle-class families, especially in globalizing cities around the world, from London to Bombay and New York to Istanbul, have awakened to the belief that the latest round of world capitalist accumulation constitutes a fundamental shift in their ability to provide their children with what they euphemistically refer to as “a comfortable life.”
We refer to those Istanbul families that are in competition with each other under conditions of globalizing neoliberal markets as a “new middle class.” While there would appear to be a global trend in economic, social, and cultural differentiation within a middle class, accompanied everywhere by a middle-class crisis of access to, and affordability of, quality education, the dynamics of new middle-class formation must be understood within both national and local contexts where the agency of state, market, and family mutually shape each other. Although neoliberal capitalist ideology emphasizes enterprise free from state interference, in reality the formation of the state has always played a major role in shaping the evolution of capitalism and vice versa.1 Their interdependence and contradictions are part of the dialectic of capitalist social formation.
The Class Analyst Is Part of Class Analysis
Early in our research, we made a decision to focus on Istanbul middle-class households and families as agents of middle-class reproduction and transformation. At first, we focused on the meaning and content of changing household consumption habits because, we reasoned, these formed a nexus of activity at the intersection of economics and culture, a meeting of our respective professional fields of inquiry. The result was a survey we conducted in 1993 of five hundred and fifty households that (1) helped us to sharpen our understanding of middle-class social space, (2) gave us a picture of changing tastes in middle-class culture, and (3) provided us with a clear view of families that comprised a new middle-class fragment that were beginning to benefit economically, socially, and culturally due to the immanent structural transformation from welfare state into neoliberal state.2
The survey was invaluable for locating the new middle class in districts of the city, as well as confirming characteristics of new middle-class families, but it provided little information on the dynamics of middle-class formation. This came informally through endless casual conversations with friends, colleagues, students, and families. Slowly we realized that conversation gravitated toward children and their education. The mantra of “quality education” emerged as a metadiscourse for the reproduction of social class. The discourse of quality education was interwoven with another discourse—namely, the imperative for providing their children with “a comfortable life.” Together the meanings of quality and comfort framed our formal interviews that zeroed in on winning the national Selective Middle Schools tests. Money, social connections, cultural knowledge, formal schooling, and a general sophistication in the world seemed to have something to do with a determination
