Kabataş and Oktay Tuncer as a Concept

You can learn most of the subjects that are taught to you during your school years after school. You can find methods to improve yourself in subjects that are of special interest to you and make an effort to learn something. However, the concept called education has a content that goes far beyond technical information. It includes philosophy, a stance against and within life, character, and morality.

The subjects that interested us the most in high school may fall out of our focus in life, or the subjects that never interested us may eventually become the subjects we are most interested in. These are all titles that fall under the scope of “education,” but “education” is something else.

We bid farewell to Oktay Hoca today. We bid farewell physically. We left him with our hands to eternity together with Aykut Kerem Gülenç. We will not be able to see him anymore. We will talk to him but we will find the answers from him in what he left us. Oktay Hoca will live, he will continue to live. In this sense, not much has changed from now on.

Everyone thinks that Oktay Hoca is the teacher who teaches us literature. I will say something interesting, but Oktay Hoca was not our literature teacher. I accept that I loved literature because of Oktay Hoca, but I have acquired more literary knowledge in my life than Oktay Hoca fit into my high school years.

If Oktay Hoca had been my literature teacher, I would not have loved literature this much.

While teaching us literature, Professor Oktay taught us to think. He taught us to question. He showed us how to use the knowledge gained while thinking and asking questions by combining it with morality. He did not just tell us. He brought examples from life to what he told us. He made us experience the examples in class. The medium of what we experienced was sometimes theater, sometimes a book, sometimes a conversation in class, sometimes a story, sometimes a novel or a poem.

He was showing the connection between mathematics and literature with examples, emphasizing that later I understood that what we were doing was mathematical abstraction in the language of science. In fact, during my regular writing activities that I started in my early 20s, I realized in the mathematical fiction that appeared in my head that Oktay Hoca was explaining mathematical abstraction. It turned out that he was explaining the philosophy of science to us.

The subject is Abdülhak Hamit, Tevfik Fikret, Falih Rıfkı Atay, but examples are taken from the subjects, they are stepped back, conceptualized in another dimension that stands behind, and for the conceptualized knowledge, they say, “here, this information is yours now” and leave the lesson. Of course, it took time to understand this “it is yours” part. But, in my educational life, in my professional life, I realized more what Oktay Hoca did.

During a conversation with Oktay Hoca, long after graduation, I told him about my discovery about what he had done. I asked him if I had understood correctly. He smiled and said, “I just said there was a connection with mathematics and gave you examples,” but the smile gave the message. He always did that.

The one who learned the concepts would somehow acquire the knowledge. The aim should always be to move forward. I remember getting a six on one exam and a five on the next. Why do I remember this detail? After the exam I got a five, Oktay Hoca came to me and stopped. He would lean his elbow on my shoulder and sometimes say something to my ear. He leaned over and said, I am curious about something. With anxious eyes that asked a question, I said “what is it” without even opening my mouth. He said, “Why did this six become a five instead of a seven?” He didn’t say anything else.

Years passed and he said, “You were one of my best students.” I was surprised. However, I had never seen even seven as a student of Oktay Hoca. So, being a good student had nothing to do with grades. He always followed us in life. He knew what we were doing, what we were going through. He will be informed again. As always, I will talk.

During our youth, my father used to say, "Be men of character who can look straight into your own eyes in the mirror every morning while shaving." It was Oktay Hoca who said the same thing to us in class.

We learned from him that we should stand tall as moral people in life, that we should always move forward, that life is a philosophical stance. Since we learned how to learn, it did not matter what subjects we were interested in in the past, today or in the future. We would learn and do it anyway.

We came to terms with ourselves every day with the philosophy we received from Kabataş. We determined our philosophical stance against life. It may sound exaggerated, but it really is every day.

Yesterday, we were on the phone with the people of Kabataş. We were on the phone with many people but we couldn't talk to any of them. No sound. We hung up the phones. Sobbing and joining in between.

We have lost a great value. We were His good-hearted children.

Oktay Hoca was bid farewell with tears because of the values he represented. While feeling the loneliness of the social moral stance that was lost, destroyed or about to disappear, the feeling of being an orphan suddenly took over. We will continue to represent these values as good-hearted children. Coming from a tradition that makes students criticize themselves in class, that says there is no subject that we cannot talk about as long as you use the appropriate language, the language of science, and that makes us discuss everything in class, today you are having a hard time and feeling like an orphan. Oktay Hoca represented a set of values.

Today everywhere is black. But, from tomorrow morning onwards, it will be red and black again.

Oktay Hoca and Kabataş's teachers, deceased and living, who made Kabataş much more than a school and turned it into a "concept". Today, greetings to all of you through Oktay Hoca. Kabataş is a day and sometimes Oktay Tuncer, sometimes Aysen Erensoy, sometimes Oya Aksoy, sometimes Mehmet Genç, sometimes Mustafa Özay, sometimes Hasan Özak, sometimes Behçet Necatigil, sometimes Zeria Bali, sometimes Kemal Gürsan, sometimes... many more. Together with all of them, Kabataş is a "concept".

August 15, 2020