“Folklore and Education”

Abstract

Education is the work of socialization. It educates by socializing the child. Socialization is the process of internalizing the norms, values, roles, attitudes, behavioral structures of the society in which the individual lives, gaining the sense of self and identity necessary for social interaction, and internalizing the culture in which the individual lives (Bakırcıoğlu, 2016, p.1527). Education can be classified in two ways: formal and informal. While the formal part is planned and programmed education in schools, the informal part enables people to learn from the knowledge and experiences they acquire spontaneously, naturally, even without the purpose of receiving education. Çınar (2022) added the concepts of ethnopedagogy and ethnoandragogy to the subcategories of informal education and contributed to the literature on educational sciences. According to him, formal education is the visible part of the iceberg and informal education is the part of the iceberg that is underwater, invisible and constitutes its large mass. Based on this explanation, it can be said that if it is desired to raise an idealized human model within the scope of national education policy with the formal education given in schools, it is necessary to have knowledge about informal education and its content. Considering the necessity of education policies to be “national”, the importance of informal education, that is, the process of transferring national culture, cannot be denied. One of the most important building blocks of national culture is undoubtedly folklore products. Folklore (folklore); “is a science that deals with cultural products in the material and spiritual field related to the people of a country or a certain region, compiles, classifies, analyzes, interprets them with its own unique methods and aims to reach a synthesis in the last stage.” (Örnek, 1995, p.15). Folklore both conveys the traces of human groups from the past and ensures that the cultural values that exist in contemporary life are transmitted to younger generations. The transmission of national culture is important in terms of placing our cultural richness in young minds. One of the most important folklore researchers who has a world of ideas based on the field of “national culture” is undoubtedly Eflâtun Cem Güney. In this article, Güney's book “Folklore and Education” is analyzed.