aljazeera.net (03.01.2016)
The education policy of the Justice and Development Party (in Turkish, Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi – AKP) under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdo?an in Turkey has increasingly been a topic of debate among international observers.
Abstract
The education policy of the Justice and Development Party (in Turkish, Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi – AKP) under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdo?an in Turkey has increasingly been a topic of debate among international observers. The recent interest is due to the rise in the number of imam-hatip(1) (‘religious’) schools after the new education law (known as 4 4 4) was introduced by the Parliament in 2012. The rise of imam-hatip schools has been perceived as Islamization of Turkey’s secular education system. This report argues that the rise in the number of the imam-hatip schools is a simple manifestation of pluralisation of Turkish education system—which had long been regarded as mono-cultural and accordingly insensitive towards demands by a measurable segment of society for religious schooling. For the first time in Turkey’s history, the AKP introduced elective Kurdish courses into the middle schools in 2012, passed legislation in 2013 to allow establishing private schools in Kurdish, and abolished the mandatory “National Security Course” given by military officers in high schools as well as mandatory oath-taking ceremony in elementary schools. Conversion of general high schools into imam-hatip schools is a small part of a wide-ranging conversion of general high schools into academic Anatolian, vocational as well as imam-hatip schools—which started in 2010, long before Erdo?an’s speech on raising “religious youth” in 2012.
