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.