The Turkish Education Ministry has announced that Darwinian evolution will no longer be taught at a high school level and that such “controversial” theories will instead only be covered at a university level. This brings Turkish schools in line with those in several American states as well as Saudi Arabia.
Alpaslan Durmus who heads the Turkish Education Ministry’s curriculum board has stated,
“We have excluded controversial subjects for students at an age unable yet to understand the issues’ scientific background. As the students at ninth grade are not endowed with antecedents to discuss the ‘Origin of Life and Evolution’ section in biology classes, this section will be delayed until undergraduate study”.
While many westerners are up in arms about this, they really ought to exercise their priorities more carefully. When Turkey was illegally invading and occupying Syria, an occupation which goes on to this day, western liberals said virtually nothing. They did not care that Turkey was funding and arming the jihadist group FSA which has committed numerous acts of terror against Syrian civilians, including but not limited to beheadings, car bombs and mass executions.
Western liberals also did not care when the Iraqi government told Turkey to cease its unwelcome military operations on Iraqi soil, nor do they say much about Turkey’s illegal occupation of part of Cyprus which has been operating contiguously since 1974.
But now an internal Turkish matter is suddenly their obsession. If Turkish schools do not want to teach high-school level students about evolution, so be it. This is Turkey’s right as a sovereign state.
The declining education standards in the west make it so that westerners ought to show a bit of humility when criticising the educational standards of other nations. As it were, it is in East Asia where education standards are the highest. Most western countries fall well below the educational standards of China, Korea and Japan in this respect.
The west’s criticisms of Turkey’s educational standards are symptomatic of an imperialist attitude whereby the west sees fit not only to inflict war upon the world but also western thinkers upon non-western cultures. Both forms of imperialism are dangerous.
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