Abstract
The Turkish government is banning Charles Darwin from its textbooks, but following the appointment of a secular education minister, can Turkey bring evolution back to its education system?
In March, Kati Pari, a member of the European Parliament and the author of a parliamentary committee report on Turkey, wrote on Twitter that “critical thinking” was a “dangerous endeavor in ‘new Turkey’”. And last year, Atilla Yeşilada, an economist, said people in Turkey were living in “the death of critical thinking”. This latest move appears to confirm their words.
When proposed changes were announced in the autumn of 2017, a preacher named Adnan Oktar welcomed them.
The 62-year-old Islamic creationist is Turkey’s most vocal anti-Darwinist. As a televangelist, the host of a television show called Allah’s Artistry, and a social media phenomenon, Oktar exemplifies Turkey’s cultural shifts over the past decade. He and like-minded preachers have founded Islamist educational institutions, newspapers and NGOs in order to dismantle rationalism in Turkey. Thanks to the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), they have largely succeeded.
Oktar’s Science Research Foundation, which has thousands of members, is behind almost 5,000 court cases opened against Turkish secularists in the past decade. It targeted the pianist and composer Fazil Say, who was initially convicted in 2013 of inciting hatred against Islam following tweets he made, including retweeting a verse from a poem by 11th century poet Omar Khayyám who attacks pious hypocrisy. Say was given a 10-month suspended prison sentence before being acquitted in 2016. In recent months, Say’s concerts in Turkey have been cancelled because of his public defence of secularism.
Like Fethullah Gülen, another Islamist preacher, Oktar is well-versed in the works of the Islamic scholar Said Nursi, famous for his commentary on the Quran. Between them, Gülen and Oktar have written dozens of books that share a common disdain for Darwinism and rationalism.
Oktar uses social networks, both physical and digital, as recruitment tools. His followers reportedly befriend young people from affluent backgrounds and introduce them to other members of the cult. The movement has been successful at separating youngsters from families and, crucially, from rationalist ideas.
Tarik Günersel, a leading playwright and poet and the international secretary of Turkish PEN, is outraged by recent shifts in the education system. He highlights how it jars with
recent Turkish history. The founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was a staunch rationalist. “The focus of Atatürk’s secularist world view was scientific thinking with gender equality,” said Günersel.
He also laments that philosophy classes are no longer offered in secondary schools.
“Sunni Islam has become the subject of ethics classes,” he told Index. “Evolution is excluded from curriculums. Even folk dances have practically been forbidden from schools for more than a decade, because girls and boys hold hands while practising them.”
Günersel calls this process “debrainisation” and says a growing number of bright young Turks are seeking a better future abroad in Western countries because of Turkey’s war on rationalism.
Since 2002, when the AKP rose to power, the number of religious schools in Turkey has increased tenfold. A report by the Education Reform Initiative, a think-tank, showed that state-funded Muslim clerical training schools increased 73% since 2010. Many Turkish families don’t want to send their children to these schools. But if their neighbourhoods have only these schools on offer, parents find themselves without much choice.
Students at a religious Imam Hatip school attend a graduation ceremony in Istanbul, May 2017. The number of these schools has been rising in recent years
CREDIT: Murad Sezer/Reuters
And yet it is not all bad news for education in Turkey. Perhaps thanks to the level of chaos in the education system, there have been five education ministers in the past seven years. The latest one, Ziya Selçuk, comes from a secular background. Selçuk, a professor, businessman and educator, is behind the founding of some of the most progressive schools in Istanbul. And his appointment came two weeks after June’s presidential elections, when police raided the house of Oktar and arrested the televangelist on suspicion of fraud and abuse.
“The new minister is one of the best people for the task of tackling current challenges we face,” Batuhan Aydagül, the director of the Istanbul-based ERI, told Index. “Yet whether or not education improves will depend on the performance of the whole system, including bureaucrats, principals and teachers.”
Aydagül’s ERI takes a critical look at that system, and explores the problem of emotion taking over facts within education.
“Historically, Turkish education has suffered from an implementation deficiency, while policy design often reached optimum standards,” he said. “A major barrier is the highly centralised and hierarchal bureaucracy, a legacy of the Republic. The state has treated education first as a matter of national security and then a means for national development, especially since the 1960s. Therefore, changing this bureaucratic culture will be a challenge for the minister.”
A Stanford graduate, Aydagül comes from a family of teachers, and for four generations his family has focused on improving education in Turkey.
“The latest curriculum revision that removed Darwin from textbooks was a reaction to the coup attempt that Turkey survived in 2016 and, as such, it was planned and executed rapidly in a quite traumatic state of mind,” he said.
In Aydagül’s view, feelings of anger and frustration created after that coup attempt – which cost the lives of more than 300 people – were used by politicians to tweak education policy.
“Values and moral education were central to that revision,” he said. “One could easily argue that emotions were instrumental in that process.”
So far, Selçuk’s performance has been promising. In late July, he announced the appointment of thousands of teachers who were previously unemployed. And he promised to assign students to regular schools instead of religious ones, as desired by their parents.
But Günersel, the playwright, says that unless Turkish democrats can manage to re-secularise the education system, the fight to save rationalism will be lost.
“I hope my present pessimism for the immediate future of our worsening education system proves to be in vain,” he added.
Aydagül shares this hope. “Whether or not a rational approach to curriculum change can happen is yet to be seen,” he said. “But if and when that happens, it will be much welcomed.”