According to a recently released analysis of 28 Turkish textbooks, the country’s education system – once a model of secularism that taught evolution, cultural openness, tolerance toward minorities, and Kurdish as a minority language – has increasingly replaced those concepts with notions of jihad, martyrdom in battle, and a neo-Ottoman and pan-Turkist ethno-religious worldview in its curriculum, said Dr James M. Dorsey, a Senior Fellow at the RSIS, in a commentary. The report is likely to add to skepticism about an 11-point human rights action plan recently unveiled by Turkey President Erdogan that aims to bolster freedoms and legal protections.

…Dr. James M. Dorsey, a non-resident Senior Associate at the BESA Center, is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture.