You cannot benefit sufficiently from the experts at international standards which are already few and thus you cannot fulfill your desires in the international race of development.

I would like to dig deeper in the last paragraph of my commentary on Thursday. It ended as follows: "Unfortunately, level of educational attainment and skills in Turkey is not as high as the developed countries or those rapidly catching up with the developed countries. We are all aware of this fact. However, we frequently miss out the fact that we cannot sufficiently make use of the experts that have above-the-average level of educational attainment and skills. To put it differently, we fail to benefit sufficiently from the potential we have."

These are the two features of an institution that concern and scare me: the absence of experts the institution has to employ in order to fulfill its obligations and the fact that such experts employed within the institution have been laid on the shelf. If one of these applies, the said institution can cause any trouble you can imagine. 

Expertise goes down the drain

Unfortunately, Turkey had suffered (and in fact has been suffering) such troubles a lot. We know the fundamental reason. Any political ideology in power, even if it does not forget that it is in power to serve to Turkey, might be of the opinion that services must be offered only to its supporters. Although this is not the only possibility, it is a quite common phenomenon in immature democracies. Under these circumstances, expertise goes down the drain. Or the definition of the expertise might turn into "having point of view 'as alike as two peas in a pod'".

The second feature is the fact that despite having a sufficient number of experts, the senior managers of the institution feel that they are "smart boys" and do not ask the opinion of the experts. This feeling might in some cases go beyond a single institution; the minister to which the institution is affiliated to might consider himself/herself smart. This feeling is quite common among the people with a "Prof." title before their name, like myself. This ego problem is unfortunately quite common in our profession.

These "smart boys" have ready-made prescriptions. They have left everything behind, thought things that no one else could and prescribed formulas that will solve a number of problems overnight. Since they are "smart boys" and since there is no one smarter than they are, they do not feel the need to discuss their prescriptions. 

This circle must be broken
For them; discussions are a waste of time. And probably, it is an assault to their intelligence. Their prescription must be adopted no matter what. Moreover, they have brought with them the "smart-to-be"s which will applaud for the intelligence of the "smart boys".

These two are really scary features particularly for countries like Turkey which have a relatively lower education and skills level compared to developed countries. This prevents you from benefiting sufficiently from the experts at international standards which are already few. And as a natural outcome of this, you cannot fulfill your desires in the international race of development.

There exists a crystal-clear vicious circle: This disease of underdevelopment certifies your underdevelopment. The disease stemmed from underdevelopment in the first place. Therefore, the disease deepens, further impeding your efforts towards development. Do not you think that it is time to break this vicious circle down?

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 09.04.2011