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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: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday January 31 2017, @02:23PM
My hypothesis: It's all about power. If you allow people to learn that there are universal truths that do not depend on the power structure within their society, then those people are less dependent on that power structure. They might even think to overthrow it (ahem...sadly, just tried and failed). On the other hand, if you bind their knowledge to religion, which is interpreted by people, who are closely tied to the government? Then you create sheep. Easily led sheep, because questioning their government would first mean questioning their knowledge. And people are loathe to question what they know and believe.
I quite agree. If you read the story "What is Turkey's problem with Darwin?", you find this passage:
Wrestling over the theory of evolution in Turkey goes back to the late Ottoman Empire, which saw a period of relative freedom of thought. Self-declared “materialist” Ottoman thinkers, among them Abdullah Cevdet and Suphi Ethem, translated the works of evolutionary scientists, including the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. In turn, some Islamist Ottoman thinkers, like Ismail Fenni Ertugrul and Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi, wrote refutations of the “school of materialism,” raising arguments that also challenged the theory of evolution. In other words, they wrote dissenting opinions instead of calling on the government to silence opposing viewpoints.
In the more secular Republican era, the theory of evolution entered school textbooks and popular culture. It was often used in making ideological claims, going beyond a mere scientific theory. In the 1970s, the Marxist left adopted Darwinism as a cornerstone of its dialectical materialist philosophy. The right, perhaps understandably, began to see Darwinism and atheism as almost synonymous concepts. From the 1980s onward, translations of books by the “new atheists,” such as Richard Dawkins, added fuel to the fire. In response, Islamic creationism exploded in Turkey, often using arguments borrowed from Christian creationists in the United States.
From the Ottoman period onward, the theory was used to challenge Islamic philosophy and the power of certain clerics. The fundamental problem here is that Islam purports to be not just a justification of human morality, but an explanation of the world. Evolution is one of the key sour notes in Islamic explanations of the world and how it came to be.
I don't believe Erdogan is playing a long game. He's following old tactics that have been around long before he was. The original Mohammad was the one playing the long game.