In 2017, Turkey stopped teaching evolution at secondary school: for extremists, Darwinism remains a taboo subject. Instead, school textbooks started teaching Turkish pupils "jihad."
.... Secular Turks were shocked when Binali Yildirim, then Minister of Transport, explained to an interviewer why, in his youth, he changed his choice of university:
"I visited Bogazici University and saw that girl and boy students were sitting together... I feared I could go astray. And I decided to attend the technical university."
Yildirim who later became President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's choice for prime minister now serves as parliament speaker.
It is not surprising that for Turkey's extremists, governance broadly means the Islamization of everything, including education at every level. In a 2017 speech, Erdogan boasted that, after his Justice and Development Party came to power, the number of students at the religious imam hatip schools rose from 60,000 to 1.3 million.
Unsurprisingly, Erdogan has often declared his political ambition not as raising honest, well-educated, free minds, but as "raising pious generations." [Gatestone Institute] Read more
