Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE VILLAGE AND THE WORLD
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Page 278
papers reached either village, except accidentally and occasionally. Yet people's attitudes were not uniform. Almost everyone admitted the advantage of being able to add up and subtract ecause one could avoid being cheated. And most households had young men away in the army or in the towns with whom they wished to correspond. Some of the children who could read were fascinated by old American or European magazines because they recognised the letters, and even more so when they found something in Turkish which made sense. Literacy is a great advantage to a young man during military service. A few families even thought in terms of the promotion of their young into the urban literate world. One ordinary middle-run villager in one village had sent a son to Kayseri schools by using kinship ties in the town and then eventually to Istanbul University, and several young men had been to the Village Institute to train as teachers. As a new largely literate generation grows up, the uses of literacy in a rapidly developing economy will surely become more obvious and education more acceptable. At the same time the status benefits of achieving higher education will become plainer.
Government Services
Education, once a community matter but now a government service, has far more direct effect on the villages than any other, and for this reason I have given it separate treatment. From the point of view of Sakaltutan and Elbashï in 1950-52, the remaining government services fall into three groups: public works, agricultural and veterinary services, and health services.
Government interest in providing villagers with roads and water supplies became conspicuously greater after the election in 1950. Public buildings, particularly schools which had once been village responsibility, were undertaken at government expense. This system provides the village not only with improved facilities but with paid employment, and became a major topic for lobbying the local powers through one's influential friends. A village like Sakaltutan stood to gain little from the new system since its contacts were few, but Elbashï had far more opportunities to play the game. While I was there the Public Works department paid for work on the village approach road, the
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