The Minister stated during his speech at the inauguration ceremony that libraries will remain open throughout the summer holiday after the end of this school year.

 

"We will continue to support our students with four summer schools, namely science summer school, arts summer school, mathematics summer school and English summer school this year. All students will have the opportunity to attend these free summer schools in any part of the country," said Özer.

 

Özer went on to say that:

 

"We will witness many problems concerning history and civilization awareness will vanish as long as our youth spends quality time in libraries and adapts reading habit. Some people have complaints about our youth. I don't agree with them. We are proud of our youth. They are rational but they need a little compassion. They need us to provide more opportunities for them. When we offer these, they will open new horizons."

 

Noting that they considered libraries as the center of culture and civilization and acted accordingly, Özer said, "We have taken our first step in order to enrich and reinforce libraries. Our second step was naming libraries after human treasures like İlber Ortaylı. We previously named another library after Doğan Hızlan. We also named the conference room after Alev Alatlı."

  

Noting that the 2021-2022 school year will end soon, Minister Özer expressed his happiness to continue face-to-face education without any interruption during the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

Özer stated that the pandemic once more showed that schools provided students the opportunity to learn from their peers.

 

"I am proud of our teachers. They are the heroes of this process," said Özer.

 

He stated that Türkiye has solved all problems that prevented accession to education and concentrated on increasing the quality of education.

 

"We are implementing important projects in order to decrease opportunity differences among schools. One of these projects was the No More Schools without Libraries Project which was initiated on October 26, 2021. We had founded 16,361 schools within two months and completed it until the end of 2021. As of the end of 2021, there are no more schools without libraries in our country. Number of books in school libraries at the beginning of the project was 28 million. In other words, the number of books per student was 1,6. Today, there are 70 million books and the number of books per student is 3,6. Our goal is to increase the number of books at school libraries to 100 million until the end of this year."

  

Meanwhile, historian and author Prof. Dr. İlber Ortaylı said that Vefa High School is an old and important education institute and many important names of the country were among the graduates of this school.

 

Ortaylı expressed his gratitude about the Ministry's decision to name the library after him by saying, "I am touched by this gift."

  

İstanbul Governor Ali Yerlikaya, İstanbul Provincial Director of National Education Levent Yazıcı, Fatih Mayor Mehmet Ergün Turan, students and teacher were also present at the inauguration ceremony.