Following the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) move to add “etiquette and good conduct courses” to the national curriculum, teachers unions have raised concern over the content of the courses, saying the government is pushing its political agenda on schoolchildren.
Speaking to the Evrensel daily, union members said the government was trying to indoctrinate schoolchildren. The course curriculum has already been approved by the Ministry of Education’s Council of Education and Morality and will be taught to junior high school and high school students.
Kadem Özbay, chair of the Eğitim-İş teachers union, said these courses seemed innocent but were developed according to the religious and political ideologies of the government. Furthermore, pedagogists and child development experts were not consulted when the curriculum for the etiquette courses was devised. This raised a red flag for union members, who emphasized the utmost importance of examining the content of such courses.
Simge Yardım, from the Education-Science Workers Union (Eğitim-Sen), said the Ministry of Education had been including the ruling party’s ideology in the national curriculum for years and attempted to indoctrinate students from an early age.
“Compulsory religious classes already indoctrinated students in the government’s interpretation of conservative Sunni Islam. Now, with these etiquette and good conduct courses, the AKP will have more opportunities to shape the minds of young students,” she said.
Religious classes were made compulsory with the 1982 Constitution, which was drafted after a military coup on September 12, 1980 and ratified under military rule. The constitution is known for its restrictive approach to human rights; therefore, the organizations said it did not comply with democratic principles or the demands of society.
Compulsory religious classes have been criticized for only covering Sunni Islam and not giving a place to other religious beliefs, including Alevism. Moreover, these classes are offered to children as young as 4 years old. Families believe this is too young to understand abstract phenomena such as “God,” “angels” and “prophets” and for children creates the impression that Islam is the only religion that exists.
Özbay added that government officials keep talking about “redesigning the curricula according to our national values” but that these values were rooted in conservative Islam, which the AKP follows.
“The government has close ties to very conservative religious orders, and they develop the educational program in close collaboration with these orders,” Özbay said. “So when they talk about etiquette and good conduct, we believe these values are rooted in conservative religious ideology.”
Historically, Turkey’s education system was built on secular principles. However, after 2013, the education policies of the AKP started moving quickly away from secularism, and government officials began talking about raising a pious generation. The number of imam hatip schools, government-funded religious schools mainly responsible for the training of imams, tripled.
The expansion of religious schools, along with the conversion of many public schools into imam hatips, fueled growing public criticism, especially among parents and students who are left with no other public schooling option in the vicinity of their homes.
