AI is worsening Türkiye’s middle-class identity crisis | Column
Daily Sabah · Doğan Eşkinat ·
AI and inequality are reshaping the link between hard work and success, challenging the middle-class dream and its enduring values
A friend of mine, a graduate of one of Istanbul’s most prestigious schools, was recently drafted into a family intervention. Her niece, then a senior at the very same high school, was refusing to study for the university entrance exam. Her parents had exhausted their arguments and hoped that an aunt with an impressive diploma might succeed where they had failed. The aunt made her case. The niece listened politely, then asked a single question: “Well, how much do you make?”
It would be easy to dismiss this as teenage insolence. It is something far more unsettling: an empirical objection. Advice of this kind has always relied on proof by example. Study hard, get into a good school, work diligently and you will end up like your aunt. The aunt was the argument. The niece simply checked it and found it unconvincing.
In Türkiye, this is no small matter. The university entrance exam is not merely a test, but the central rite of middle-class life. Generations of families have sacrificed savings, weekends and their child's entire adolescence to prep schools and practice tests, believing that a good score would open the door to a good life. In this sense, a teenager who refuses to sit for it is effectively rejecting a creed.
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