[Discussion] Fwd: The Beshik, or why we do not speak Tatar.

[gonul@bilkent.edu.tr]

Sayin arkadaşlar/meslektaşlar,

Aşagidaki metin konusunda yorum yapacak profesyonel formasyon sahibi değilim. 
Ancak olanlar,  yorumlarını esirgemezlerse sevinirim.  

Dear friends/colleagues,

I am not professionally qualified to comment on the text below, but I
would very much welcome those who are, to do so.

Gönül Pultar


------------- Forwarded Message -------------
Date: 09 Aug 2002 12:33 EEST
From: Iskandar Ahunov <iskandar_ahunov@yahoo.com>
Subject: The Beshik, or why we do not speak Tatar.

The Beshik, or why we do not speak Tatar.

	I have always wondered how it happened that the great
empires of Chingiz Khan and Amir Temur disappeared.
Russians once paid taxes to Tatars; later they have
recovered and even conquered the lands once belonging
to them.  Isn't there an implied contradiction behind
this? 
	A great country should only get greater, so why has
the opposite happened? I think I have found the
answer. 
	Recently I became a father and started to read books
on pedagogy, particularly those of the American
doctor, Glen Doman the founder of The Institute for
the Achievment of Human Potential.  I learnt, amongst
others, that the first years are the most important
for the children's mental development.  For babies to
develop normally, they need free physical movement
from their first days.  In his book Glen Doman writes
that probably one of the most important their
discovery is the direct connection between movement
and intelligence.
	 By chance I happened to see a baby which was kept in
the traditional Uzbek cradle, called the beshik.
Babies are traditionally kept in these cradles for the
first year of their life tightly tied so that they
can't move at all. It is fitted with a mini "sewerage
system" so the baby can stay there almost all the
time. The baby was the same age as my daughter.
Unwittingly I began to compare them. I noticed that
the baby didn’t have any fear of strangers at the age
of 10 month whereas my daughter had developed this
fear when she was five months old. Pediatricians know
that all normal babies from about five months of age
begin to fear unfamiliar people.
Suddenly, the observations of Glen Doman came to my
mind.  According to his theory, babies grow mentally
backward in a beshik because they don't have the
freedom of movement!
I made a search on the Internet for the word "beshik".
 The first attempt brought me the article of Nicolay
Kurek, a Russian doctor of psychology. In his article
"Destruction of Psyhotechnology" he writes that Soviet
psychologists carried out experiments seeking ways of
improving the education of Soviet people. In 1928,
Soviet psychologist A. Shtillerman published the
results of these tests on Russian, Uzbek and Ukrainian
children. The test demonstrated that there was 2-5
time more mentally normal children among Russians than
among Uzbeks. The number of severely backward children
among Uzbeks was almost 10 times higher than it should
be in any normal population. Moreover by the age of
12-14, the results of Uzbeks got even worse.
Shtillerman also suggested that the reason for the
backwardness of the Uzbeks was the beshik.
Thus my hypothesis found corroboration in Kurek's
article. Those scientists were branded as chauvinists
and racists and later oppressed because their theory
contradicted Soviet ideology at the time. This is
another Soviet crime against humanity. Appropriate
measures to inform people about the harm the beshik
causes have to be taken 80 years later!
Because Beshik is used by all Turkic people, I think
that is why the development of Turkic nations has
slowed down. For centuries they have been experiencing
the lack of qualified people. I think this also
explains the decay and destruction of the great Turkic
empires of Chingiz Khan and Tamerlane.
The worst is that Turkic people continue to use the
beshik even today. I presume that half the population
of Central Asia use it today. It is quite obvious that
it is nothing but barbarism to continue to use such a
relic.
Taking into account all the facts, we can also
conclude that the rate of development of a nation
depends on their nursery traditions, which defines the
average IQ of the nation. 

Iskandar Ahunov. 02/07/2002

Literature:
Glen Doman, How To Teach Your Baby To Be Physically
Superb.
Nikolay Kurek, Destruction of Psyhotechnology. "Noviy
Mir", ¹2, 1999 


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