Reflections of Neoliberal Perspective on Education in the Ninth Development Plan

Development plans are documents that cover a country’s future predictions on different fields such as health, education, agriculture, and industry. They also state what public and private sectors do and what they need to do in the future, as official papers including governments’ predictions on the country’s future, development plans may be affected by different ideologies. Like many other developing countries, Turkey has started to be affected by neoliberalism since the 1980s. How can this affect be seen in the development plans? On which clauses in the development plans can the reflection of neoliberalism be explicitly or implicitly observed? Which term and principles related to neoliberalism take place in which clauses within the development plan? Within the scope of stated problems, Turkey’s Ninth Development Plan is analyzed and discussed in this study. The current study applied documentary analysis, one of the qualitative research designs. As a result, some clauses of the Ninth Development Plan have been determined to be closely related with education and the economy. It has also been found that almost all clauses related to education in the development plan include some neoliberalism associated terms such as workforce, employment, and workforce competence.