April 03, 2007	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 14, 1428

ISTANBUL: “Happy is he who says he is a Turk,” pipe hundreds of uniformed children in unison, lined up in the playground before a golden statue of Turkey’s revered father Ataturk, for a daily pledge of hard work and sacrifice.

The enthusiastic chanting ends and the children file into school, past an inscription saying their first duty is to defend Turkey and another of the national anthem -- texts which appear again on the classroom walls and preface all their textbooks.

When they move up to high school, they will take a weekly class from army officers about the military’s exploits. Their school books will tell them European powers have their sights set on Anatolia and Turkey’s geography makes it vulnerable “to all kinds of internal and external threats”.

Textbooks are peppered with the sayings of Kemal Ataturk, who founded modern Turkey in 1923 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. “Homeland ... we are all a sacrifice for you!” comes particularly recommended by one textbook’s authors.

These are just some of the features of Turkey’s education system that reformist teachers and activists want changed. They say it encourages blind nationalism -- something Turkey is looking at more seriously since the ultranationalist-inspired murder in January of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink.

MILITARISM: Political rows with the European Union, which Ankara hopes to join, have also fanned nationalism but many experts say the seeds are first sown at school.

“In newly founded nation states like ours education is an effective political lever to train and transform people ... but in recent decades this concept, which needs to be loosened, continues,” Ziya Selcuk, university professor and former head of the government’s Training and Education Board, told reporters.

This government has reformed the curriculum in a way teachers say makes students more active and reduces traditional rote learning, but the emphasis on nationalism remains.

Nationalism is not the only problem with schools in Turkey, which, hemmed in by the budget restraints of an IMF accord, spends little on education.—Reuters