Rise of Turkish Islamic schooling upsets secular parents
(Reuters) - Turkey has
seen a sharp rise in religious schooling under reforms that President Tayyip
Erdogan casts as a defence against moral decay, but which opponents see as an
unwanted drive to shape a more Islamic nation. Almost a million students are enrolled in "imam hatip"
schools this year, up from just 65,000 in 2002 when Erdogan's Islamist-rooted
AK Party first came to power, he told the opening of one of the schools in Ankara last month. The schools teach boys and girls separately, and give around
13 hours a week of Islamic instruction on top of the regular curriculum,
including study of Arabic, the Koran and the life of the Prophet Mohammad.
"When there is no such thing as religious culture and
moral education, serious social problems such as drug addiction and racism fill
the gap," Erdogan told a symposium on drug policy and public health
earlier this year. But in the drive to create more imam hatip places, parts of
schools have been requisitioned, prompting protests from parents who want
secular education for their children. "We are against the governance of education by
religious rules," said Ilknur Birol, spokeswoman for the "Don't Touch
My School" initiative, an umbrella grouping for angry parents. "This
system is not rooted in youth with a forward-looking perspective enlightened by
science, but in a generation that values obedience."
Filiz Gurlu, a parent at the Kadir Rezan Has school in Istanbul where one of two
buildings was converted to imam hatip facilities, said primary students were
now cramped in a single building. "The library, laboratory, computer and music rooms were
in the confiscated part, so the kids don't have access anymore," she said.
"Some classrooms have barely enough space ... This is an unplanned move,
kids just can't simply fit in."
The debate over education straddles a faultline in Turkish
society dating back to the 1920s, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk forged a secular
republic from the ruins of an Ottoman theocracy, banishing Islam from public
life, replacing Arabic with Latin script and promoting Western dress. Erdogan, who won Turkey 's first popular presidential
election in August with 52 percent of the vote, has cast himself as a champion
of the rights of the pious, redressing the balance after decades of Kemalism. "If during their education our youths become alienated
from their language, history, ancestors, culture and civilisation, it means
there is a very serious educational problem there," he told a national
education convention on Tuesday.
Opponents say Erdogan's style of rule, giving supremacy to
what he believes is the will of the majority, means their views are ignored. Huseyin Korkut, head of the imam hatip alumni association,
said there was strong demand for imam hatip schools, but his assertion was
based on surveys in just three regions, the broadly conservative Kayseri , Konya and Erzurum provinces. He said the body had urged the government in vain to conduct
a nationwide survey. "Changes in school types were decided by local
bureaucrats in a rather arbitrary manner," said Isik Tuzun, a coordinator
at the Education Reform Initiative, a think-tank at Istanbul 's
Sabanci University
Reforms under the AK Party have aimed to redress the balance
after decades of secularist rule. Religious middle schools were shut in 1997
under pressure from the secularist military after an Islamist-led government
was pushed from power. A secularist government later tried to undermine religious
schools by tweaking university entrance exam grading to make it more difficult
for their pupils to gain access. "Those were truly hurtful days. I hope God never makes
us live through days like those again," Erdogan told the school opening
last month.
Primary school students no longer recite a deeply
nationalistic vow at the start of each week beginning with the words "I am
Turk", a legacy of Ataturk. University entrance grading was revised in 2011 so imam
hatip pupils were no longer disadvantaged, and a ban on the Islamic headscarf
in middle schools was lifted last year. A large parliamentary majority also enabled the AK Party to
push through hasty changes in 2012 including allowing religious education,
previously restricted to high school students, at middle school age.
While some of the moves angered Erdogan's secularist
opponents, broader reforms over the past decade have boosted teacher numbers
and lifted the years of compulsory schooling. Andreas Schleicher, an education expert at the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), said the result had been an improvement in
average test scores for 15-year-olds in the decade to 2012, albeit from a low
base. "Turkey still
has a long way to catch up with the industrialised world in education. But if
you just look at the amount of change that has happened, both on quality and
equity, that's still remarkable," he said.
