‘Like a Bridge over Troubled Water': Reforming the Education of Muslim Minority Children in Greece

In 1997, the Greek Ministry of Education presented the authors ¹ with an amazing challenge: the reform of the education of Muslim minority children in Western Thrace, Greece. Muslim minority children had suffered from poor education for many decades. At the onset of the intervention, although there were no reliable statistics on school attendance and drop-out rates, or any assessment of pupils’ educational and linguistic competences, it was common knowledge that a large number of children were coming out of primary school illiterate in Greek and functionally illiterate in Turkish. Moreover, the drop-out rates from nine-year compulsory education were significantly higher to that of children belonging to the majority.