Nobody has a right to call anybody 'ignorant'

It was in the Aegean city of ?zmir where I attended middle school and high school, at ?zmir American College. I never had a disabled classmate or a Kurdish one, not even a poor one. When I graduated I was able to explain the American civil war and the discrimination against blacks in the U.S., but my knowledge about Turkish society was almost zero. I guess I only knew about the problems of Alevis in those years and that was due to the Mad?mak incident that happened then and I had chosen the Alevis as a topic in my term papers.

Self-criticism is needed for the advancement of societies, just like individuals. Otherwise we will keep on making the same mistakes.  

After the elections we have witnessed, again, quite a lot of people from the schooled segment of Turkish society unfortunately despising a significant portion of the people, labeling them as "ignorant."

Let this be the last election where one accuses the other of being ignorant. As a matter of fact, we are not much different from each other; the schooled and the unschooled of this country are wrong and incomplete in terms of active citizenship. Both of these segments are weak in raising active citizens because the school education of none of us has covered this. Those who had better opportunities maybe had a better chance to develop these skills because they had the financial means to pay for a better education. But even theirs is a faulty active citizenship education.

Let us take a look at the discrimination in private schools that you need to pay a fee for. For instance, there are parents who strive not to have any disabled children in their kid's class, whereas a non-disabled kid can learn a lot of things from a disabled kid and can actually turn into another person. These...