Primary Education in Turkey, Morocco, Egypt, Greece, and the United States :: Essays Papers

Primary Education in Turkey, Morocco, Egypt, Greece, and the United States Throughout this program I have been confronted with many images and facts about primary education that I will not soon forget. The sounds of young Turkish children reciting "I am a Turk, I am strong"; the image of six year olds in Morocco learning to memorize the Qur'an before they can read or write; the idea of community schools in Egypt where students and parents learn together to benefit and bring prosperity to the community as a whole; and, finally, the idea that art is so important to Greek culture that it is one of the five major goals of primary education. These are all interesting things, they are all things I never would have expected to learn through this program, and they have made this topic and project more meaningful for me. I chose the topic of primary education not only because I am studying to be a teacher, but also because there are a lot of controversies and new ideas that are coming into American education currently, particularly the acts and ideas of No Child Lef t Behind, and I was curious to research how other countries were dealing with the same issues that we see in the educational system of the United States. I started my learning plan with the goals of seeing how primary education was structured in each of the countries we were visiting (Turkey, Morocco, Egypt, and Greece) both theoretically as well as how effective the actual practice of education was, to see what the situation regarding the primary education of girls was in each of the countries and what differences existed in the education of the two genders, to find out the unique solutions each country had found for their own educational system that addressed their country's own specific challenges, to see the role that nationalism and religion played in the primary education of students in each of the countries, and finally to come to the grand finale of the purpose of primary education in each of the countries, to use that information to help me better understand primary educati on, and to compare these findings to the purpose of primary education in the United States. In my project today I plan to lay out seven aspects of primary education, explain how each of these aspects is carried out in the four countries we visited, and then to speak about how each aspect influences the cultures of Turkey, Morocco, Egypt, and Greece.