Syrian Refugees in Turkey: (Un)Equal Opportunities in Education

The number of Syrian refugees seeking shelter in Turkey continues to rise as Syria enters its tenth year of violence. The ongoing crisis has resulted in more than 3.5 million registered Syrian refugees (UNHCR 2019). Although multiple social, economic, and security related debates have been studied by researchers in this field, the scope of this chapter focuses on the education of the Syrian refugees in Turkey. Despite the importance of such challenges, there is a much more pressing issue, which is providing education to all children who constitute 1.6 million Syrian refugees of which more than 430.000 are out of school (UNICEF 2018) in Turkey. In this chapter we provide a detailed review of the current situation of schooling Syrian refugee children in Turkey. We seek to investigate how Turkey responded to meet the Syrian refugees’ educational needs and how the continuing efforts are still in violation of the basic human rights of refugees because around half a million of them are still out of school (Karasapan and Shah 2018). In the conclusion section, we end with a discussion of how the responses thus far have not improved despite the many years that had passed and how this is in violation of basic human rights