ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Pastor Ahmet Guvener managed to get his daughter, a Christian, an exemption from mandatory religious classes in her Turkish school. But he soon found that the 17-year-old wasn’t really off the hook.
As an alternative to the classes at her school in Diyarbakir, in southeast Turkey, she would have to choose from three electives: the life of the Prophet Muhammad, the Quran or basic religious knowledge — or fail the year.
“It seriously damaged my child’s psychology,” said Guvener, who heads the Protestant Church in Diyarbakir. He accuses the school of deliberately forcing religious education on students — a claim the teachers’ union denied.
Turkey has long enshrined the secular ideals of founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, particularly in an education system that until recently banned Islamic headscarves in schools and made schoolchildren begin the day reciting an oath of allegiance to Ataturk’s legacy. Now proponents of Turkey’s secular traditions claim President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is taking a new path, building a more Islam-focused education system to realize his stated goal of raising “pious generations.”
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Yalcin, of the pro-government teacher’s union, denies a deliberate move to force religion on the students through the elective classes.
“The aim is to open the way to elective religious education, in line with the wishes of the people,” he said. “There is no question of forcing the classes on students.”
Education expert Abbas Guclu, who writes for Milliyet newspaper, argues that increasing religious education may not necessarily lead to a more pious generation.
“It is not possible to control the youth of today,” Guclu said. “If they spend three or five hours at school, they spend eight or 10 hours in front of the Internet, the social media or television. For every few hours of religious education they spend hundreds of hours elsewhere, being bombarded by other things.”
