As Turkish children go back to school, they will see significant changes to biology lessons that risk limiting their understanding of the world. In Hungary, academic freedoms are also under attack. Both changes are down to the rise of authoritarian politics and they put science education and research independence in danger.
In Turkey, information about natural selection and Charles Darwin鈥荣 theory of evolution is being removed from secondary-school biology texts for 15-year-olds as part of an ongoing move away from a secular schooling system.
Announced last year, the changes are taking effect this month after an onslaught of criticism about the teaching of evolution by Turkish preachers led by Islamic creationist Adnan Oktar, who hosts his own television show.
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Oktar, who also runs a 鈥淪cience Research Foundation鈥�, has backed thousands of court cases against Turkish secularists, as a recent report in Index on Censorship magazine detailed.
Destroying Atat眉rk鈥檚 dream
Pressure to change the curriculum seems to have ramped up after the failed coup in Turkey in 2016. According to figures from the Turkish Ministry of National Education, the number of religious schools in the country has , and many children have no other options when it comes to attending a local school.
These trends are part of a shift by the current Turkish government away from the fact-based education and society envisaged and introduced by Turkey鈥檚 moderniser and first president Kemal Atat眉rk in the 1920s and 30s.
Index, a global publishing and campaigning organisation on free expression, has also charted the pressures Turkish academics are under in its project.
As part of that, Bermal Aydin told how she was forced to move countries to carry on her work. After leaving her post at Turkey鈥檚 Mersin University, Aydin is now a research fellow at the London School of Economics. About 8000 academics are thought to have lost their jobs in Turkey in the government crackdown that followed the coup.
Restricting freedom
Meanwhile in Hungary, the government of prime minister Viktor Orb谩n is putting pressure on the independence of scientific research and attempting to censor teaching.
As Members of the European Parliament this week vote on a report into related to human rights and civil liberties, members of the respected Hungarian Academy of Sciences are seeing a gradual restriction in their independence as the government sets up parallel institutions and reduces their funding.
The academy, founded in 1825, is due to see about half its budget of 25 billion forints (about $90 million) taken away in 2019. From January next year, if the academy of sciences accepts the deal on the table, the government will also get to shape its decision-making board. Hungarian political scientist and researcher said: 鈥淭his is a deal offered at gunpoint and it means that the autonomy of the academy is over.鈥�
These changes are directly related to a leadership that doesn鈥檛 like critics or an independent media. Concurrently there has been a rise in anti-Semitism, attacks on Hungarian organisations that receive international funding and attempts to close the Central European University in Budapest.
What we are seeing is typical of the censorship that invariably occurs as countries move away from democratic values, and slip towards intolerance. Their governments take aim at those who inform the public 鈥� typically academics, journalists and activists 鈥� and try to silence them. Worldwide attention is needed.
Read more: Well-being will suffer if we don鈥檛 trump the anti-science trend
