Erdogan Turns Sights On Schools
ISTANBUL — Public schools are closing, on little or no notice, and being replaced by religious schools. Exams are scrapped by presidential whim. Tens of thousands of public teachers have been fired. Outside religious groups are teaching in schools, without parental consent.
The battle over how to shape Turkey’s next generation has been a tumultuous issue for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who won re- election on June 24 in a referendum of sorts on his deepening imprint on the country after 15 years at the helm.
Mr. Erdogan has already chipped away at Turkey’s democratic institutions, purging the courts and civil service of suspected opponents, bringing the media to heel and leaving in place a state of emergency after a failed coup in 2016.
His opponents fear that his re- election to a newly empowered presidency after constitutional changes last year will give Mr. Erdogan almost unchecked authority.
Education has become a central issue. Most controversial has been Mr. Erdogan’s push to expand religious education. He has made clear his desire to recast Turkey in his own image, one rivaling the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the republic and its first president. Atatürk was a nationalist and secularist. Mr. Erdogan is an Islamist who rose from the conservative, religious working class.
Even while prime minister, six years ago, Mr. Erdogan declared his desire to “raise a pious generation.”
Turkey’s religious roots run deep, even if the separation of religion and state is well established. Even Mr. Erdogan’s main presidential challenger, Muharrem Ince, did not oppose the drive for religious schools, but rather sought to seize the issue from him, promising they would be optional.
The stance was clearly intended to unite an electorate that has been divided by Mr. Erdogan’s program, which has replaced many secular public schools with religious ones, known as Imam Hatip schools. ( The name means Cleric Preacher.)
Mr. Erdogan has vastly expanded the schools, from 450 schools 15 years ago to 4,500 nationwide today. His government increased the budget for religious education this year by 68 percent, to $1.5 billion.
As the elected head of the government, Mr. Erdogan has every right to make the changes he wants, said Batuhan Aydagul of the Initiative for Education Reform, a nongovernmental organization.
Eighty-seven percent of the school population is still in nonreligious schools, he noted. “This is not Pakistan,” he said.
But especially among the aspiring middle class of Istanbul and other cities, parents have complained that Mr. Erdogan has aggressively pushed religious instruction in ways divisive, deceptive and damaging to educational standards.
Some parents are pulling their children from the religious schools and sending them to private ones, or settling unhappily for technical and vocational schools.
The Education Ministry has acknowledged that 69 percent of places in Imam Hatip schools remained unfilled as late as 2016. But the schools keep sprouting up.
In Besiktas district, parents have been fighting a losing, two-year battle to prevent their school from being turned into an Imam Hatip school. The school has already been partially converted, and religious instruction has increased.
Last year, a class of 12-year- olds were shown a film about demons that was so violent and scary that several had nightmares, parents said. “The film teaches if you renounce your faith you will have this horror,” said one parent, Erdogan Delioglu. Despite parents’ complaints, the same film was shown to another class in May.
“They are stealing the children’s future,” Mr. Delioglu said.