Turkey’s
new curriculum: More Erdoğan, more Islam
Secularists
critical of education ministry’s blueprint.
By ZIA
WEISE 2/13/17, 4:32 AM CET Updated 2/13/17, 5:11 AM CET
ISTANBUL — With
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s plans for greater powers firmly
on track, Turkey’s government has set about shaping the country’s
future outside the halls of parliament.
Last month, as
parliamentarians brawled over — and finally voted for —
constitutional changes designed to establish Erdoğan’s
long-awaited presidential system, the ministry of education published
a draft curriculum for the new school year.
Some of the changes
appeared innocuous: Children will be taught about renowned Turkish
and Muslim scientists alongside Einstein and Newton, for instance.
But secular-leaning Turks were enraged at the plan to remove classes
on evolution and the country’s founding fathers, accusing the
government of injecting education with its conservative-religious
ideology.
Egitim-Sen, a
teachers’ union often critical of government policy, worried that
the draft curriculum would encourage a “religious and nationalist”
mindset, with its emphasis on “Turkishness” and Sunni Islam.
Meanwhile, parliamentarians of the largest opposition party CHP
condemned what they saw as the “erasure” of the Turkish
republic’s founding president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: The
education ministry wanted to cut back on classes covering him and his
successor, Ismet Inönü.
The government hit
back: The new syllabus would teach Turkey’s history “from the
perspective of a national and moral education,” the education
ministry declared. The aim was to “protect national values,”
added the undersecretary of education, Yusuf Tekin. Moreover, the
ministry pledged it would alter its teaching of religion to comply
with the European Court of Human Rights, replacing phrases such as
“our religion” with the more neutral “Islamic religion.”
Secular-minded
parents fret over the education ministry’s plan to teach pupils
about the concept of jihad and its proposed removal of evolution from
science classes.
The ministry even
requested the public’s feedback on its proposal — a rare move in
Turkish politics, but unlikely to reassure its critics. Turks who
adhere to their country’s constitutional secularism increasingly
feel that their lifestyle is under threat from Erdoğan and his pious
support base.
Turkey’s
secular-religious rift is as old as the republic itself. Until
Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) rose to power in
2002, the two sides’ fortunes were reversed: Following Atatürk’s
westernizing reforms in the 1920s, the secular elite ruled the
country while pious citizens were marginalized.
In the early years
of AKP rule, Erdoğan seemed to bridge the divide; both liberals and
conservatives lauded his reversal of the headscarf ban in
universities, which had barred generations of women from higher
education. But on both sides, feelings have hardened since. Rhetoric
like ministers declaring a woman’s job to be motherhood, incidents
like an incensed mob storming a Radiohead party during Ramadan and
government policies such as steep tax hikes for alcohol have
contributed to a sense of besiegement among secular Turks.
It’s also not the
first time that education has emerged as a battleground. The
government’s decision to allow young girls to wear headscarves at
school and Erdoğan’s call for mandatory Ottoman-Turkish language
classes were met with condemnation from secularists. In 2014, parents
took to the streets in protest against education reforms that
enrolled as many as 40,000 pupils in state-run religious
institutions, called imam-hatip schools, whether they liked it or
not.
Imam-hatip schools
were established in 1923 to train imams, a measure to impose state
control over religion in accordance with Atatürk’s secular vision
for Turkey. Today, they teach students the national curriculum in
addition to religious classes. Since the AKP’s election success in
2002, enrollment in these schools has surged from 63,000 to one
million. Erdoğan, who has expressed the wish to raise a “pious
generation,” attended an imam-hatip school himself.
For years, Turkey’s
curriculum has remained largely untouched by the growing role of
religion in public life. Now, however, secular-minded parents fret
over the education ministry’s plan to teach pupils about the
concept of jihad and its proposed removal of evolution from science
classes.
“The
government is using the story of the coup to present Erdoğan as a
hero” — a history teacher at a high school in central Istanbul
But a stronger
emphasis on Islam isn’t the only change that worries government
critics. The ministry has added a class on the coup attempt that
rocked Turkey on July 15 last year; the plotters’ failure to
overthrow the government has become a highly politicized founding
myth to Erdoğan’s vision for his country. In the first week after
the summer holidays, pupils were handed a government-issued pamphlet
explaining the coup attempt, and shown videos of Erdoğan reading out
a poem alongside footage of planes firing onto the streets of Ankara.
“The government is
using the story of the coup to present Erdoğan as a hero,” said a
history teacher who works at a high school in central Istanbul. (He
asked to remain anonymous, given the difficult climate for educators
in Turkey: Tens of thousands of academics and teaching staff have
been suspended following the coup attempt.)
On his phone, he
flipped through images, showing me portraits of “martyrs” —
those who died during the coup attempt — pinned up on classroom
walls. “It’s politicized history,” he said. But he argued it
wasn’t so different from the current curriculum: “It’s always
been a history of heroes. Now, it will be more Erdoğan and less
Atatürk.”
The new curriculum
will likely be imposed on schools from September onward. But the
history teacher said he would still give lessons as he saw fit. In
the privacy of the classroom, no one could stop him from suggesting
“alternative books” to supplement the government’s required
reading — a furtive act of protest.
“In Turkey,” he
said with a smile, “teaching is political.”
Authors:
Zia Weise
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