{"id":2324,"date":"2017-02-13T15:22:29","date_gmt":"2017-02-13T15:22:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/?p=2324"},"modified":"2017-02-13T15:22:29","modified_gmt":"2017-02-13T15:22:29","slug":"turkeys-new-curriculum-more-erdogan-more-islam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/?p=2324","title":{"rendered":"Turkey\u2019s new curriculum: More Erdo\u011fan, more Islam"},"content":{"rendered":"

By ZIA WEISE
\npolitico.eu<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Secularists critical of education ministry\u2019s blueprint.<\/strong><\/p>\n

ISTANBUL \u2014 With President Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan\u2019s plans for greater powers firmly on track, Turkey\u2019s government has set about shaping the country\u2019s future outside the halls of parliament.<\/p>\n

Last month, as parliamentarians brawled over \u2014 and finally voted for \u2014 constitutional changes designed to establish Erdo\u011fan\u2019s long-awaited presidential system, the ministry of education published a draft curriculum for the new school year.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Turkish students attend a lesson at their school in Istanbul on March 23, 2012. Education reforms which would allow parents to put their children in religious schools at 10 have sparked fierce debate on whether they would dent Turkey’s secular credentials and even provoked a punch-up in parliament. Under new proposals which could be on the statute book within weeks, children will now be able to taken out of the secondary school system and undergo vocational training four years earlier than at present. Teachers and big business have joined the opposition in decrying the moves as another attack on secularism by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), a movement which has strong Islamist roots. AFP PHOTO \/ BULENT KILIC (Photo credit should read BULENT KILIC\/AFP\/GettyImages)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u2019s founding fathers, accusing the government of injecting education with its conservative-religious ideology.<\/p>\n

Egitim-Sen, a teachers\u2019 union often critical of government policy, worried that the draft curriculum would encourage a \u201creligious and nationalist\u201d mindset, with its emphasis on \u201cTurkishness\u201d and Sunni Islam. Meanwhile, parliamentarians of the largest opposition party CHP condemned what they saw as the \u201cerasure\u201d of the Turkish republic\u2019s founding president, Mustafa Kemal Atat\u00fcrk<\/a>: The education ministry wanted to cut back on classes covering him and his successor, Ismet In\u00f6n\u00fc.<\/p>\n

The government hit back: The new syllabus would teach Turkey\u2019s history \u201cfrom the perspective of a national and moral education,\u201d the education ministry declared. The aim was to \u201cprotect national values,\u201d 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 \u201cour religion\u201d with the more neutral \u201cIslamic religion.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ministry even requested the public\u2019s feedback on its proposal \u2014 a rare move in Turkish politics, but unlikely to reassure its critics. Turks who adhere to their country\u2019s constitutional secularism increasingly feel that their lifestyle is under threat from Erdo\u011fan and his pious support base.<\/p>\n

Turkey\u2019s secular-religious rift<\/a> is as old as the republic itself. Until Erdo\u011fan\u2019s Justice and Development Party (AKP) rose to power in 2002, the two sides\u2019 fortunes were reversed: Following Atat\u00fcrk\u2019s westernizing reforms in the 1920s, the secular elite ruled the country while pious citizens were marginalized.<\/p>\n

In the early years of AKP rule, Erdo\u011fan 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also not the first time that education has emerged as a battleground. The government\u2019s decision to allow young girls to wear headscarves at school and Erdo\u011fan\u2019s call for mandatory Ottoman-Turkish language classes were met with condemnation from secularists<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

Imam-hatip schools were established in 1923 to train imams, a measure to impose state control over religion in accordance with Atat\u00fcrk\u2019s secular vision for Turkey. Today, they teach students the national curriculum in addition to religious classes. Since the AKP\u2019s election success in 2002, enrollment in these schools has surged from 63,000 to one million. Erdo\u011fan, who has expressed the wish to raise a \u201cpious generation,\u201d attended an imam-hatip school himself.<\/p>\n

For years, Turkey\u2019s curriculum has remained largely untouched by the growing role of religion in public life. Now, however, secular-minded parents fret over the education ministry\u2019s plan to teach pupils about the concept of jihad and its proposed removal of evolution from science classes.<\/p>\n

But a stronger emphasis on Islam isn\u2019t the only change that worries government critics. The ministry has added a class on the coup attempt<\/a> that rocked Turkey on July 15 last year; the plotters\u2019 failure to overthrow the government has become a highly politicized founding myth to Erdo\u011fan\u2019s 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 Erdo\u011fan reading out a poem alongside footage of planes firing onto the streets of Ankara.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe government is using the story of the coup to present Erdo\u011fan as a hero,\u201d 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.)<\/p>\n

On his phone, he flipped through images, showing me portraits of \u201cmartyrs\u201d \u2014 those who died during the coup attempt \u2014 pinned up on classroom walls. \u201cIt\u2019s politicized history,\u201d he said. But he argued it wasn\u2019t so different from the current curriculum: \u201cIt\u2019s always been a history of heroes. Now, it will be more Erdo\u011fan and less Atat\u00fcrk.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201calternative books\u201d to supplement the government\u2019s required reading \u2014 a furtive act of protest.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Turkey,\u201d he said with a smile, \u201cteaching is political.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By ZIA WEISE politico.eu Secularists critical of education ministry\u2019s blueprint. ISTANBUL \u2014 With President Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan\u2019s plans for greater powers firmly on track, Turkey\u2019s [more >>>]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2325,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-turkey"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/covcasbulletin.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Covcas-Turkey-students-photo-Bulent-Kilic-AFP-via-Getty-Images.jpg?fit=714%2C475&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2326,"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2324\/revisions\/2326"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}