Efforts stemming from the Turkish
government’s religious agenda to severely censor students’ access to modern
evolution theory threatens educational freedom. In Turkish high school
classrooms, the coverage of evolution theory is
vague, human evolution and origin of vertebrates are ignored
entirely, leaving any questions about origins of human and other animals
to be
answered by creationist ideas taught simultaneously in mandatory religion
courses and science class. Paleontology,
as an evolutionary science, in higher education lacks a modern
integrated approach of anatomy, morphology, ecology, and macroevolution. In
geology departments micropaleontology, based on the memorization of
(invertebrate) fossil taxa names to tell us about the age of strata, is the only
taught. Both biology and geology
departments
do not offer vertebrate paleontology education.
There is a lack of variation among the
departments’ course offerings; nearly identical curriculum. The freedom of
academics to determine the content of the courses they teach is stifled by
university bureaucracy overseen by the Council of Higher Education (YÖK). This
study addresses the connection between students in the Turkish public education
system who are deprived of the principles of biological
evolution, human
evolution, vertebrate paleontology and educators who are intellectually and
pedagogically unequipped to teach these topics. All high school textbooks are
either written by or filtered through the Ministry of National Education, and
therefore are subject to political bias. The content of Finnish high school
biology textbooks is analyzed and used here as a counter example in critiquing
and making recommendations for amending the coverage of human evolution in
Turkish high school biology textbooks.
