Why impose "autonomy" against students' culture?

Dear Editor,

The Americans have spent many bloody months imposing "democracy" on our neighbouring country, Iraq.
Last year I went to a workshop given in my country by a foreign expert on ways of introducing our students to the idea of "learner autonomy". Was this lecturer, aware, I wonder, of how Turkish society behaves? Maybe he thought he was in Sweden where various forms of autonomy are a natural part of the building of society. Surely Scandinavian "autonomy" has borne marvellous fruit in their sky-high divorce rate.
Why should we, in Turkey, take over the hard individualism and independent-mindedness that lies behind this much vanted "learner autonomy". Ours is a warm, social culture in which people depend on each other and on their family.

They do not consider themselves as being separate atoms, but as part of many social molecules.And can I add, here in Turkey, students see in their teacher a rich, parental guide from whom they have no wish of breaking away.

If the US incursion into Iraq is a clear act of military and economic imperialism, a week-long workshop on "learner autonomy" is, I think, a displaced act of cultural imperialism.

Yours sincerely

Tulay Duman, Gaziantep, Turkey