Erdogan orders that evolution should no longer be taught in Turkish schools
TURKISH schoolchildren will no longer be taught about evolution, in another sign of the conservative direction the country is heading in under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Alpaslan Durmus, the head of curriculum for the ministry of education, said that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was “controversial” and would be removed from school programmes by 2019.
“We have excluded controversial subjects for students at an age unable yet to understand the issues’ scientific background,” Mr Durmus said.
“As the students at ninth grade are not endowed with antecedents to discuss the ‘Origin of Life and Evolution’ section in biology classes, this section will be delayed until undergraduate study.”
The proposal to strip evolution from the curriculum was included in a draft proposal that has already been approved by Mr Erdogan, Mr Durmus said. The final curriculum will be released next week.
The move is part of what secular critics describe as a creeping strain of Islamism throughout Turkey’s once proudly secular state.
A group of academics criticised the move saying that it put Turkey in the same category as Saudi Arabia, where the deeply religious curriculum forbids the teaching of evolution.
“The subjects of Science and Technology classes in elementary schools should be presented with a perspective that allows students to connect it to subjects they will encounter in future years. It should provide them with an evolutionary point of view,” the academics stated.
Evolution is not widely accepted among religious Muslims in Turkey, although some liberal Islamic scholars have suggested that Darwin’s theory is not incompatible with the Koran’s teachings. The education ministry is also planning to scale back teaching about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey and avowed secularist. (© Daily Telegraph London)