Students in Turkey are returning to school on Monday where they will be taught evolution for the last time in their biology classes. Next fall, evolution and Charles Darwin will be scrapped from their textbooks.
Turkey has announced an overhaul of more than 170 topics in the country’s school curriculum, including removing all direct references to evolution from high school biology classes.
The upcoming changes have caused uproar, with critics calling them a reshaping of education along the conservative, Islam-oriented government’s line.
Too advanced?
Education Minister Ismet Yilmaz said the new “value-based” programme had simplified topics in “harmonisation with students’ development.” He said evolutionary biology, which his Ministry deemed was too advanced for high school, would still be taught in universities.
Other contentious changes include teaching about jihad or holy war in religion classes as the “love of homeland”, and a lessened emphasis on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic . Atatürk instituted the separation of state and religion, but President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s party has challenged that strict split with a more religious approach.
Turkey’s education system is already reeling from the trauma of the failed July 15, 2016 coup attempt and the new scholastic programme highlights that government victory as “a legendary, heroic story”.
More than 33,000 of the nation’s teachers — about 4% of them — have been purged in a government crackdown after the coup, nearly 5,600 academics have been dismissed and some 880 schools shuttered for alleged links to terror groups.
The belief in creationism that life originated and changed through divine creation is widespread in Turkey. Many educators are worried because Turkish students are already globally ranked “below average” in science, mathematics and reading compared to their peers across the world.
Mehmet Somel, the head of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Society of Turkey, says Turkish students will be unable to understand even basic science if their studies make no direct reference to evolution.
Cagri Mert Bakirci, a biologist who founded an online learning project called the “Tree of Evolution”, calls the Ministry’s claim that evolution is too difficult for Turkish students an “insult” to them and their teachers. His volunteer project reaches nearly eight million people each week over Facebook with videos and articles.
“I can explain evolution in 10 seconds,” he said.
Mr. Erdoğan has repeatedly voiced his desire for a “devout generation”. Previous changes to the education system have included an increase in public schools providing religious studies and more elective classes on Islam. The new curriculum will be rolled out in steps and assessed. This year, students in first, fifth and ninth grades will use the updated programme. Other classes, including the changed biology programme, will be fully integrated next fall.
