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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 VLM on Tuesday January 31 2017, @02:41PM
I don't disagree with your analysis and conclusion of of the hypothesis, but... if he had a dislike of universal truths he'd be burning philosophy books, physics books, math books, history books, geology books, it would be quite a book burning party.
Of course specifically going after evolution today and getting boatloads of world wide press coverage doesn't force, imply, or prove he's not removing algebra from middle schools (oh wait thats only stupid Americans doing that) or replacing history books with copies of Mein Kampf quietly last week or next week while not getting world wide journalist coverage about those topics. Or as another alternative maybe its been illegal for a long time for Turkish kids to read Plato or Kant.
Another aspect of my devils advocate which I didn't realize was multiculturalism. In the USA nothing brings financial donations and fundraisers and social signalling and holier than thou on all sides than a nice evolution debate. But Turks aren't and don't have to be Americans and just because we get all agitprop on both sides of the argument that by no means forces another cultural group to care equally. I know the Americans are all pissed off about this, but Turkish culture is the property of Turkey (kind of like how American culture used to be the property of Americans but I digress). USA people have a long tradition of making fun of ethnic cultures that care about stuff we don't care about, so turn about being fair play, there might be non-STEM Turks LOL at the dumb americans fighting over teaching evolution in schools. Or maybe not. Seems a reasonable theory. This disconnect between what USA journalists care about vs what Turk civilians care about was inspired by American fake news outlets going into Trump-insanity in recent weeks while the general population via polls show a general response of "that's exactly what we elected him to do, cool".
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @04:07PM
He's not replacing them with "Mein Kampf", but as TFA says he indeed is changing quite a bit of what they learn about history. In particular, learning about Atatürk (the person who created the modern, secular Turkey) will be reduced.