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PREFACE

One of the most salient social phenomena of our times is the rise of global cities and the associated remaking of national middle classes into global new middle classes as a consequence of economic globalization through global corporations that are restructuring welfare states and making them into neoliberal states. Much has already been written about economic differentiation within the middle class as a result of deregulation of national markets and the unprecedented changes taking place in work and family life. Less well documented but equally salient for class formation is the effect of global processes on the changing culture of the urban middle class. And one of the most salient aspects of middle class social reproduction, old or new, is quality education as a path to occupation destinations and a cultural ideology of consumption that reinvents what it means to live “a comfortable life.” This urban ethnography of middle class formation through selective education is a contribution to the larger project of the comparative study of elite education and formation of middle classes in this era of globalization. It comes at a time when the value of testing in the context of human capital development and the increasing option of privatized alternatives to public education are being aired in newspapers and on television and when families are seeking alternative forms of schooling for their children.

While the relationship between the new middle class and selective education in world cities is everywhere becoming more apparent, the dynamics of class formation by means of selective education remain particular to state formation, national economic policies, family formation, local cultures, and national education systems.¹ This book is an ethnographic account of those dynamics as expressed in the struggle of middle-class families in Istanbul to provide their children with quality education during a period of transition during an early phase of global integration. Its internal logic turns on families' perception that for their eleven-year-old children to have a comfortable life, they must win the national state-directed Selective Middle Schools Examinations (SMSEs). The odds that they will fail are daunting and at times overwhelming. The result is a social drama in which wives act against their own will and become exam-obsessed mothers who engineer and design their children as test machines, while fathers, embittered by what they perceive to be a corrupt system that would turn families into an instrument of state policy and expose them to the economic exploitation of a market for education services, go into deep denial or passive resistance.

This story is told in part through the voices of parents who provided us with discourse themes from their narrative accounts of the system and their struggle, itself a complex construction that requires a reflexive stance on bureaucratic rationality and standardization. These interpretive themes appear in different chapters and become part of the larger analysis of a changing middle class from 1983 to 1997. From one perspective, middle-class formation is shaped by a transformation in state formation and market forces that have bifurcated and transformed what it means to be middle class. From a perspective inside the middle class, families became liberalized and made the agency of their own class reproduction, including a class awareness of what is at stake. We emphasize that not only is the Istanbul new middle class conscious of its structural location in economy and society but its families are able to articulate their interests. This study explores the meaning of belonging to the Istanbul middle class through their discourse on education, testing, and their own analysis of the whole system that we will refer to as the field of competition relations. Both state and families view their relationship to each other in terms of objective conditions of existence for the reproduction of a privileged class in Turkish society.

The historical moment of transition in Turkey that marks the temporal phase of this social drama is known in official discourse as the liberalization episode. It began with an economic crisis in the 1970s that led to a coup in 1980. The Turkish economy did an about-face by turning away from protectionist state policies of import substitution to deregulated export-oriented policies that opened Turkey in general, and Istanbul in particular, to flows of global capital, information technology, telecommunications, and trade goods. In the Turkish case, the economic transition was from state policies of import substitution that protected national industries and agriculture to state policies that deregulated finance capital and imposed new burdens of taxation on the middle class. Economic restructuring that resulted in a bifurcation within the middle class exacerbated an already widening gap between the rich and the poor, which contributed to persistent economic crisis and posed a threat to political and societal stability.

We chose Istanbul as the site of this study for two reasons, one having to do with Istanbul itself, the other having to do with method. The first is that globalizing cities in every country are the best place to observe the dynamics of middle-class formation in the context of globalization processes. It is in globalizing cities like Istanbul that competition for access to the best education plays a pivotal role in middle-class transformation over the last several decades. The economic and cultural risks and opportunities associated with middle-class capital accumulation were greatest there, and the disparities in class competition most apparent and observable. Their greatest impact was felt in Istanbul, which had always been a world city and a center of commerce and long-distance trade across imperial and, in the twentieth century to the present, national borders.

The city also had long been a center of education. In Istanbul today, there is an unambiguously close relationship between selective education and the formation of a small, privileged Turkish upper middle class. Issues of cosmopolitan culture are part of the larger picture, but they also become directly relevant when we look at selective education. In Turkey, not unlike much of Europe, there is an aristocracy of intellectuals that is inscribed in the line of demarcation between the education of the upper middle class and other classes or class fragments. Foreign language and culture are among the distinctive markers of an upper middle class. Distinctive subcultures of the upper middle class have developed around school ties and networks of classmates. And selective middle schools, not coincidentally, instruct in foreign language. Most of the best middle schools are in Istanbul, some of its most prestigious universities are there, and most of its private schools and all of the new private universities built in the 1990s are there. Migrants who are already middle class or are middle-class aspirants view education as one of the main factors for family migration to Istanbul as well as to Ankara or Izmir. The rapid growth of state investment in selective Anadolu schools, accompanied by a turn toward a neoliberal policy of the expansion in private schools at all levels of the education hierarchy after decades of state resistance, are signature education policies of the liberalization episode. From 1983 to 1997, the key point of entry to class privilege that flows from access to the best schools was entry to middle school. In Turkey, access to the best middle schools is attained through the national Selective Middle Schools Examinations (SMSEs), state-controlled and managed tests that began in 1983.

When in 1983 the Ministry of National Education introduced the SMSEs, Istanbul's middle-class families had the most to gain but also the most to lose from a new national selection system that was labeled “objective” and “fair.” The annual national examinations quickly became an arena for intensive middle-class competition among families, which planned for the examinations and prepared to win places in schools that offered the highest probability of a child entering a small number of elite universities in Turkey or, even more desirable for many new middle class families, scholarships in universities abroad.

The second reason for the choice of a particular site for the study of middle-class formation has to do with our approach to class analysis through field methods of research that become the basis of an ethnographic tradition of writing. In our case, an economist and an anthropologist offer the prospect of integrating global, national, and local perspectives on the relationship between economy and culture in a balanced analysis of different kinds of data and information, from the statistical and analytical perspective of macroeconomics to the participant observer and interview approach of interpretive cultural anthropology. In the ethnography, this collaborative effort appears as a commitment to give the state and market their due as agencies of class formation while acknowledging the importance of family practices as the key agent of class reproduction and social consciousness. The overall movement that reflects the structure and organization of the book is from global through national to local frameworks of analysis, but we do not tell the story in a rigid, linear progression. Subjects of different chapters require different durations of time and locations of place that reflect uneven development, contingent history, and variable rates of change in different institutions. The organization and content of the entire book reflect our attempt to achieve these methodological aims and, in the final analysis, contribute to a comparative understanding of the emergence of new middle classes around the globe.

Notes

1. For recent scholarship on issues in educational development and social transformation in a global economy, see the essays in Mebrahtu, Crossley and Johnson 2000. Jacque Hallak, in his essay on “Globalization and Its Impact on Education,” emphasizes the impact on global acceleration in economic freedom, technological innovation (especially in communications), and interdependence among these fields of innovation (2000: 21–40).