Turkish textbook controversies

Turkish textbooks have faced criticism for their negative depiction of Greeks and Armenians, lack of depiction or explicit denial of Ottoman-era massacres and genocides, denial of the existence of the Kurdish people, as well as understating and condoning Ottoman-era slavery. According to a study by Abdulkerim Sen, human rights education in Turkey subscribes to the 'escapist model'; Sen explains that Turkish textbooks either deliberately avoid human rights issues, struggles, campaigns, and activists altogether, or window-dress human rights issues by presenting de-contextualised narratives. Sen further states that the curriculum fails in respect of critically examining on discrepancies about claims made in Turkish textbooks vis-à-vis realities of human rights; and has scope to improve the curriculum encouraging learners to explore transformative powers of Human Rights Education.

Since the early twentieth century, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey attempted to modernize and secularize its public life and education. However, since the 1980s, various Turkish government dispensations started promoting the Islamization of Turkish education in the name of promoting national unity; After Erdoğan came to power, the process of radicalizing Islamism in Turkish education and compromising on science education accelerated further.

According to Fatma Müge Göçek, in Turkey, the Education Ministry controlled the entire system ranging from textbooks, teacher training, course content, and even the questions asked at graduation examinations. One outcome of this policy was the excessive centralization of knowledge production. Moreover, most textbooks were penned by retired officers at the expense of other scholars who lacked the kinds of connections the ex-officers had. Göçek says that popular public intellectuals participated in the construction of this nationalistic presentation alongside scholars. The state’s inclusion of non-academic groups into discussions on how to write history textbooks further popularized and mythified Turkish history. Göçek states that such nationalist interference in the production of knowledge obviously colored and affected all subsequent research. The proofs of Turkish history textbooks were also continually reviewed with a similar intention, one memoir writer noted, “to correct the mistakes...of many of the history books published in our country... [that] had either consciously or unknowingly minimized the role of Turks in world history.” Göçek explains that as a consequence, instead of promoting critical thinking, the information contained in the textbooks ended up regurgitating the official Turkish nationalist rhetoric.