Reactions from Turkey

School: Istanbul International Community School Istanbul

Contact: ray benton-evans

Date: 11-14-2000

Dear sir,

Hello! As far as History courses in grade 7, 8, and 9 at Istanbul International Community School are concerned--the only Flemish person covered so far is Mercator. How about Ann of Cleves--one of the wives of Henry V111?? Good luck with your project!

School: Bilkent University Preparatory School Ankara

Contact: francis@bups.bilkent.edu.tr

Date: 1-17-2001

To the researchers of Sint-Lodewijk,

I apologise to you for taking so long to respond to your request. You must have notified the director of the school of my tardiness, because he asked me again to get on the case. Actually I have not been ignoring your project, but I had a few difficulties. One is that I had to be able to read your web page in order to begin and I do not have web access in the same place that I have e-mail. Also, our elementary school, middle school and high school resources are spread about different buildings of our campus. We do not use single textbooks for any of our grade levels, but rather have a wide range of resource books. Finding and checking the indexes of so many books was a rather time-consuming task.

You may be disappointed to learn that we do not devote any particular part of our curriculum to Flanders. Belgium as a whole arises in our 20th century course for its role in the First World War and the origins of the European Union. By the way, we do not devote any time to Canada, my home country, either. In fact, our World History courses have surprisingly little to say about Turkey, the country where we live.

Therefore, none of the pages of books I am about to list would be REQUIRED reading for our students, but they do appear in our classroom materials.

Scientists Andreas Vesalius: a couple of paragraphs about his work in Farah & Karls, "World History - The Human Experience" (Glencoe, 1994), p.471 and also in L.E. Snellgrove, "The Early Modern Age" (Longman, 1989), pp.152-3.

Artists Although there is no commentary about the man, some paintings of Pieter Breughel appear as illustrations in Esmond Wright (ed.), "History of the World - The Last Five Hundred Years" (Bonanza, 1984) on pp.15, 16, and 19. Pieter Paul Rubens: "History of the World" is mentioned in passing on p.64, and appears on a chart of political and cultural events on p.91.

Sundries: Jansenius: If this name refers to the same person as Cornelius Jansen, a 17th-century bishop of Ypres, then he and the Jansenist movement get a couple of paragraphs in "History of the World", pp. 125-6.

Politicians: Wilfried Martens: appears in Anthony Sutcliffe, "An Economic and Social History of Western Europe Since 1945" (Longman, 1996) pp. 261-2.

I'm not at all sure how useful scans of all of these pages would be to you, but if you would like scans of some of them, please let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Good luck with your project!

Sincerely, Francis van der Hoeven Head of Social Studies Bilkent University Preparatory School