Erdogan regime drops evolution from school curriculum
ISTANBUL— Turkey has removed the concept of evolution from its high school curriculum, in what critics fear is the latest attempt by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government to erode the country’s secular character.
Starting in September, a chapter on evolution will no longer appear in Grade 9 students’ textbooks because it is considered too “controversial” an idea, an official announced last week.
“Our students don’t have the necessary scientific background and information-based context needed to comprehend” the debate about evolution, said the official, Alpaslan Durmus, chairperson of the Education Ministry’s education and discipline board in a video posted on the ministry’s website.
The news has deepened concerns among Erdogan’s critics that Erdogan, a conservative Muslim, wants to alter the identity of a country that was founded in 1923 along staunchly secular lines.
“The last crumbs of secular scientific education have been removed,” said Feray Aytekin Aydogan, head of EgitimSen, a union of secular-minded teachers. Aydogan also scoffed at the suggestion that evolution was too complex a concept for teenagers to understand.
“Forget high school, you can comfortably explain it in preschool,” she said. “This is one of the basic topics you need to understand living beings, life and nature.”
Over the past five years, analysts have noted how Erdogan’s government has steadily increased references to Islam in the curriculum and removed some references to the ideas of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder. It has also increased the number of religious schools, known as imam hatip schools, and spoken of Erdogan’s desire to raise “a pious generation” of young Turks.
Erdogan has also moved gradually to reduce restrictions on the wearing of Islamic dress. In 2011, he removed a ban on head scarves in universities, and in 2013, scrapped a similar ban in the civil service. This year, he did the same for women in the army, an institution previously regarded as the last bastion of hard-line secularism.
For some, these changes simply constitute a progressive attempt to open up public space and discourse to the pious sections of the population that for decades were marginalized by the country’s secular and military elite.
Others, however, see an attempt to promote religion, not just ensure its freedom. According to Kerem Oktem, the author of Angry Nation, a history of contemporary Turkey, the country is “not continuing along a process of secularization — it’s going into a postsecular context.”
Still, Turkey is not considered likely to morph into a second Iran.
Erdogan’s party — the Justice and Development Party, or AKP — has a confusing relationship with Islamism.
Its leaders have tended to deny they are Islamists, preferring instead to be known as conservatives. Several of the AKP’s female lawmakers are unveiled.
The AKP “uses religion to get votes,” said Jenny White, an expert on the changing role of Islam and secularism within Turkey. “But they do not have a coherent theological, religious ideology.”
The party and Turkish politics in general are best viewed through an authoritarian lens rather than an Islamist one.
“The AKP is all about staying in power — and whatever it has to do to stay in power, it will do,” White said.