Evolution out of Turkish school curriculum under Erdogan
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 ninthgraders’ 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, chairman of the Education Ministry’s Education and Discipline Board, which decides the curriculum. Durmus made the comments in a video posted on the ministry’s website.
The news has deepened concerns among Erdogan’s critics that the president, a conservative Muslim, wants to radically change 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 Egitim-Sen, a union of secular-minded teachers. Aydogan also scoffed at the notion that evolution was too complex for teenagers to understand.
“Forget high school, you can comfortably explain it in preschool,” she said in an interview. “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 also has 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 also has moved gradually to reduce restrictions on the wearing of Islamic dress. In 2011, he removed a ban on headscarves 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.
“It’s not true that Turkey is becoming less secular,” said Ezgi Yagmur Kucuk, 20, a trainee anesthetist who does not wear a veil. “Everyone can believe whatever they like.”
Others, however, see an attempt not just to promote freedom of religion, but to ensure its primacy.
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 post-secular context.”