Yesterday, he came up with a new one:

The National Education Ministry has decided to permit high school students, no matter how unsuccessful their grade performance has been, to pass on to the next grade.

Rather than staying behind, these students will move on to the next level, and will instead "owe" the school work in the classes they failed. 

Of course, by awarding laziness, you are also supporting truantism. So, those who played hooky all year and failed their classes have been amazingly rescued from "staying behind" at the end of the year.

And so you may ask, what is the reason for this decision which places dynamite right under the quality of education in our country? Well, it's terrible:

It turns out that up to 450 thousand high school students a year are currently staying behind in their grades. And so the ministry is now thinking not in terms of educating these youth and making upstanding members of society of them, but rather of the cost involved in one more year of education for them. 

Since the government spends abour 5 billion lira per student per year, this means a big savings for the ministry.

You no doubt remember the words of Tayyip Erdogan a couple of months back, when he criticized the level of Turkish universities, saying "If they were quality institutions, they would be on the list of the world's top 500 universities."

The responsibility of those who speak badly of Turkish universities was laid bare in comments they have also made lately about high schools and primary schools in the country:

This year, of the 768 thousand or so students who entered crucial high school exams, around 65 thousand got scores of "0" on their tests. Education Minister Huseyin Celik said of this, "The matter is being exaggerated...there are thousands in the US and England who finish high school and cannot really read and write." So saying, he took on the defense of his front.

Education policies like these meant that this year, of the nearly 2 million candidates for university in the country, around 57 thousand sitting the entrance exams also got exactly "0" points on their tests.

This is an increase from last year's candidates, of whom 32 thousand got "0" on their exams.

What I want to say is this:

We are fooling ourselves if we think our country can harness and ride the era we are living in with such populist and irresponsible (irresponsible not just regarding education policy, but it terms of rearing generations who are enemies of our secular Republic) approaches.