The Role of Education: Capability Building or Transformation of Identity?

Education is an instrument both to protect and bequeath the identity and values of a nation and to provide scientific and technical progress. The first function of education is cultural and local; its second function is international or global. Education preserves nations through the former while it builds civilizations through the unification of ideas provided by the later. In addition, education is the responsibility to prepare the most appropriate environment and ground, which improve child’s ability and aptitude. This might be possible with educational policies which direct its central focus on students. Education is not a factory to grow up people whose body is native but spirit and values belongs to the West. Today, the most threatening element to education is the appropriation of technological advancements which are the common property of mankind for the West and, through it, the efforts for internalization and presentation of Western values as "universal values" by sanctifying them. In statist conception which defines education as "the development of 'desired' behaviours in children", the "desired" values have never become people's values. On the contrary, they became Western values presented in such packs as "universal, contemporary and modern". There is nobody who asks the opinion of society in this respect. The Western values are imposed to society by law. This situation threats our identity which is the constant value of education. This research aims at demonstrating how democracy indispensable for education as much as political system and providing a basis for an academic discussion