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National and International Education at Eyüboğlu Schools
The Mission Statement of Eyüboğlu Schools states explicitly that we aim to prepare our students, for lives as valuable members of both their national and international communities. This means that, while offering everything that a young person needs to succeed in terms of knowledge acquisition, of a good grounding in Turkish culture, in terms of university entrance and other traditional expectations, our schools go further and offer an international dimension to education.
What do we mean by an international dimension to education? Language is of course important, and we place great emphasis on the learning of both English and a second foreign language, but there is more to it than that. We believe that to succeed in life today a young person needs not only to meet the standard requirements of a national system but also to fulfill to the utmost their own individual potential. It is from the exploration of individual differences and the harnessing of individual strengths and personal strategies that a human being can develop the motivation and drive necessary to become empowered and effective.
The three programmes of the International Baccalaureate Organisation, PYP, MYP, and the Diploma Programme, offer the potential for this personal development. Because they represent different stages of a child’s development, the three programmes are very different from each other. However, there are certain features common to all three:
- Purposeful learning for the real world “Education for Life”;
- A balance between human values and knowledge
- Interactive learning
- Critical thinking
At the same time, the IBO programmes offer Eyüboğlu Schools the opportunity to set high standards, for students and teachers. Since the IB Diploma Programme started to be taught here in 1996, by successfully preparing successive groups for the internationally set and evaluated Diploma examinations, we have been able measure our standards and improve the quality of education for all pre-university students – not only those who are in the Diploma Programme. Starting with academic year 1998-1999 PYP and MYP have also started being implemented at Eyüboğlu schools. After an extremely rigorous preparation period, in March 2000, an authorization visit was made to Eyüboğlu by IBO professionals and consequently Eyüboğlu was granted MYP authorization by IBO.
The intense endeavors that have been undertaken since year 2000 to get authorization to implement IB PYP in the Primary section have been crowned with the Primary School’s being granted authorization in December 2005. Thus, Eyüboğlu became the first and only Turkish school which has been authorized to implement all three IB programmes, i.e. PYP, MYP and DP. With this success, Eyüboğlu took its place among the 71 out of 1900 IB schools in the world which have authorization to implement all three IB programmes.
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