The Ministry of Education announces new curriculum

The Ministry of National Education has announced the draft of the new curriculum for schools. According to this, a brand-new education system will begin in schools. 

The draft, titled the 'Century of Turkey Education Model', will remain open for public review for one week for teachers and experts to examine. Then, naturally, without taking any opinions or suggestions into account, it will be finalized by the Board of Education and Discipline and put into practice in the new academic year!

The next curriculum change will likely be written with the same half-Ottoman, half-Turkish words as above. Because yesterday, the Ministry of National Education announced the “Century of Turkey Education Model” draft, which concerns compulsory courses at all levels of education. 

Minister of National Education Yusuf Tekin had announced in November that they were working on this new curriculum. They worked and worked, only to go back a century. One must congratulate them. 

According to the draft they published;

The Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge course will be taught in grades 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12. 

The Life of Our Prophet course will be in grades 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and...

The Holy Quran course will be in grades 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and...

Additionally, there is a Basic Religious Knowledge course in the 9th grade. 

The History of the Turkish Revolution and Kemalism course will be taught in grades 8 and 12. 

“Century of Turkey Education Model” draft looks almost like a party program when you examine it. 

On the first page of the program, a tree is drawn, and they have named it ‘Competent and Virtuous Human’. Leaves such as peaceful human and peaceful family have been placed on the branches of the tree. In the diagrams in the draft, phrases like virtue, value, moral consciousness, and commitment to national and spiritual values have been used, and then a plan has been prepared with ordinary details. 

The hours for basic sciences have been reduced. Details such as religious knowledge and morality, manners, national values, etc., have become the foundation of education from primary school to high school! 

The Ministry of Education (Maarif Nezareti) was established in 1857. In 2024, while the nation is going to space and colliding protons, the Ministry of National Education has given the most space in the new curriculum to Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge. Perhaps even the old Ministry of Education was more forward-thinking… 

Religious education should certainly exist, but if you base education on this and give less space to science, you will only be able to send tourists to space. Because these things are not accomplished with three Kulhuvallahs and one Elham.

With this education system, you will not raise scientists, but at best, a pool of partisan voters. 

Education unions have already reacted to the Ministry of National Education's new curriculum draft. Eğitim-İş Union President Kadem Özbay asked, "Are you raising disciples in a dervish lodge?" while Eğitim-Sen criticized the curriculum by stating, 'The Ministry of National Education's "new curriculum" was prepared with the aim of raising robot-like and soulless generations that do not think, question, criticize, object, or interpret. The issue is not science and democracy, but an archaic "cause." While many points related to scientific education in the curricula are carefully subjected to "weeding out," it is clear that they want to create a "religious" and "national" curriculum by centering the "new regime" that the government is building and its "2023 vision," and by skillfully placing open and hidden (implicit) goals and values into the programs.'

Since unions consist of educators, the ‘Century of Turkey Education Model’, which they do not believe in, oppose, and which is named with half-Ottoman words like a party slogan, is no feat... On the contrary, it is a time bomb placed under education.

Mr. Minister of Education, I would like to remind you that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, to whom you owe the seat you occupy, said the following exactly 100 years ago, on September 22, 1924, at a tea reception given by teachers at the Trade School in Samsun;

“Gentlemen, for everything in the world, for material, for spirituality, for life, for success, the truest guide is science and technology. To seek a guide outside of science and technology is negligence, ignorance, and heresy. It is only essential to perceive the development of the phases of science and technology at every moment we live and to follow their progress in time. Attempting to apply the principles drawn by the language of science and technology from a thousand or two thousand years ago exactly as they were today, thousands of years later, is certainly not being within the realm of science and technology…”

What I am saying is that if you move away from Atatürk's vision, even if you write in textbooks that you built a two-lane road to the Moon while the nation is actually going to the Moon, you will be left behind.