Education as Battleground: The Capture of Minds in Turkey

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Increasing the amount of time spent in primary education by merging five years of primary school (grade 1–5) with three years of lower secondary schools (grade 6–8) meant, in practice, the closure of imam hatip schools.

2. Political Islam entered electoral politics during and after the 1970s, through a succession of political parties led by Necmettin Erbakan and his Milli Görüş (National Vision) ideology which is partially inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood.

3. The Gülen community (also self-designated as the Hizmet movement) is an offshoot of the Nurcu cemaat founded by Said-i Nursi best known for his Risale-i Nur Collection, a body of Qur’anic commentary.

4. The 4 + 4 + 4 system refers to the establishment of three key units of schooling, namely four years of primary (grade 1–4), four years of lower secondary (grade 5–8), and four years of high-school education (grade 9–12). In practice, eight years of compulsory primary schooling (grade 1–8) were divided into three levels: four years of primary school, four years of lower secondary imam hatip schools, and four years of lower secondary schools. The most contested details of this bundle of education policies (dubbed as 4 + 4 + 4 reform) were changing the starting age for compulsory education from 7 to 5 (later revised due to protests), the introduction of religious education with elective courses and the conversion of secular schools into imam hatip schools.

5. In February 2012, Hakan Fidan was subpoenaed by İstanbul prosecutors with the intention of charging him with conducting illegal talks with the PKK in Oslo on the grounds that this was tantamount to treason. The draft notes of the top-secret Oslo talks were leaked to the press, placing Erdoğan who had authorized the talks in an embarrassing position.

6. At the institutional level, part of the recentralization was taking place through the conversion of secular-track schools into imam hatip schools, encouraging student enrollment at the lower secondary school level and allocating them the best infrastructure. When AKP took power in 2002, around 71,000 pupils were enrolled in them; today, the figure is around 1.2 million. This figure is significant if we consider that the total number of school children aged between 10 and 18 is around 17 million (www.meb.gov.tr). Furthermore, some of the highest scoring secular-track schools were selected as Project Schools where the appointment of teachers and school directors is tied directly to the Ministry of National Education, bypassing the central examination system that allocates posts according to competence. This instigated the uncommon phenomenon of student militancy at the high-school level (Küçükşahin, 2016).

7. Since the coup, 125,000 state employees were dismissed and more than 40,000 were jailed, suspected of supporting the coup. The crackdown on independent news media resulted in the jailing of about 140 journalists in the past year. These figures are constantly subject to upward revisions.

8. Nearly 10,000 of the teachers fired or suspended after July 15 have been members of the Egitim-Sen, a left-leaning union, which often rallies alongside the pro-Kurdish People’'s Democracy Party, or HDP, itself now the target of an investigation for suspected ties to the PKK.

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Notes on contributors

Deniz Kandiyoti

Deniz Kandiyoti is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She holds degrees from the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was also on the faculty of the Middle East Technical University, Ankara (1969–1974) and Boğaziçi University, İstanbul (1974–1980) in Turkey. She is the author of Cariyeler, Bacılar, Yurttaşlar (1997, 2007) the editor of Fragments of culture: The everyday of modern Turkey (Rutgers University Press, 2002), Gendering the Middle East (Syracuse University Press, 1996), Women, Islam and the state (Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), and numerous articles on gender, Islam, post-coloniality, post-Soviet transition in Central Asia, and gender and conflict in Afghanistan.

Zühre Emanet

Zühre Emanet has received her PhD in Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her dissertation, entitled ‘The pedagogy of difference: Islam, neo-liberalism and the reproduction of gender in primary education in AKP Turkey’ (2016), studies the fundamental transformation of the primary education sector in Turkey under the AKP government.