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Not only in America, teaching evolution is under attack. Indeed, future Turkish children will likely not learn about evolution in school, as soL international reports:
İsmet Yılmaz, the Minister of National Education in Turkey on Friday announced the new curriculum draft for school. After the draft is finalized, textbooks will be published based on the new draft to be used starting from 2017-2018 academic year.
The new curriculum draft brings some radical changes:
[...] Evolution Theory is excluded from Biology courses. The related unit named "The Origins of Life and the Evolution" is replaced with "Living Beings and Environment".
This is actually not the first strike against evolution in Turkey:
In 2013, the government had made a regulation, which let the Intelligent Design model to be included in the curriculum besides the Evolution Theory.
Also at Turkish Minute: Gov't removes evolution theory from new school curriculum
Related: What is Turkey's problem with Darwin?
(Score: 1) by JavaDevGuy on Tuesday January 31 2017, @04:22PM
Well if you want to get out of your locality, broaden your mind, and work in the wider world it probably does matter that you know how the world works and don't follow superstition as your guide to the universe. Once the magic is taught as science it becomes easier to attack geology, then space science. Next thing you know you have superstition replacing reality and a bunch of people who think the earth is a few days old and flat... not acceptable.
Whatever the stripe of superstition stand up to it, it's patent nonsense and damaging lives.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 31 2017, @05:50PM
OK that's the western social signalling response which sounds really good to westerners (like us) and probably has some aspect of truth to it but has the problem of being very optimistic and absolute in isolation.
First the targeting is wrong, these are all Turk school kids. Not the one Turk kid who will go to Stanford to say politically correct things to eventually open a dotcom startup. Most will be urban laborers, craftsmen, moms, drivers, maybe cannon fodder. Most people don't leave their locality or broaden their mind or work in the wider world and there's nothing wrong with that, especially since the economy can't find work for a large fraction of people already trying to do that. As already stated in the devils advocate position, this is for all kids not future doctors or future biologists, who DO need to know more of whats up.
Surely most of the kids are just going to see a temporary short term authority figure of their teacher arguing with their long term authority figure of their religious leader and plus or minus teen rebelliousness and aren't going to get much out of the time expended other than maybe some sophistry skills. So they're not really going to learn anything.
Meanwhile, speaking of teen rebellion, most learning no longer happens in school anyway so any kid susceptible to learning evolution will do their learning outside school as usual. Good luck stopping them with modern technology at their disposal. Its not 3000 BC anymore.
Well, kids mostly forget everything they learn in westernized daycare/school anyway. However you have to be realistic and if you wiped out a dozen hours of controversial argument that educates almost no one, it could be replaced with a dozen hours of environmental "... and thats why you should vote against installing the new municipal water system intake downstream of the chrome plating factory" or "... and that's why you don't pour used motor oil down the drain" type stuff.
Sure, in an absolute sense where kids are educated infinitely for free and actually learn stuff, sure burn thru the arguments and teach them something irrelevant to most of their lives. But in a relative sense, isn't there more important stuff to teach them?
I'll just come out and say it. IF the kids learned evolution, which they won't, it would still be a better investment of time, with better societal outcomes, to teach them cholera and malaria prevention theory and convince them to stop dumping motor oil down the drain.
I'll toss out an analogy. I like programming. I like automata theory. It sure would be nice to teach all Turk kids automata theory complete with 3sat proof memorization and stuff like that. But there just isn't enough time in the day, rounding down to none of the kids will use that information, and there's better things for a kid to learn.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday January 31 2017, @07:38PM
But maybe if they understood evolution, they'd understand why abuse of antibiotics, or stopping to take antibiotics as soon as the symptoms are gone, is an extremely bad idea.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 31 2017, @10:57PM
As a fellow Demon yourself, Maxwells in particular, you can see how as a Devil's Advocate I am obligated to point out that evolution isn't useless, just less useful than the proposed replacement in the curriculum.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01 2017, @08:20PM
Ugh, take your backwards ideologies and stuff em' in the closet. Maybe you can keep the door closed the rest of your life and let the rest of us be free to make humanity better instead of falling back on fear of the unknown to maintain religious power. Evolution is no longer a theory except by the strictest scientific interpretation, and that in no way furthers your case. Only backwards bumpkins or educated morons think evolution is a progressive conspiracy and public education would be doing a disservice by not teaching it. The search for truth, where we came from, where we're going, all that stuff that religion likes to take over, well evolution is a pretty big part of humanity's history. Once your sky fairy has evidence equal to evolution, THEN we can talk.
PS: I realize you're not dumb like the full bore creationists, just apparently sympathetic to their cause, but they deserve no quarter. They can teach their children their own beliefs, but don't try bring that stupidity into public education.