The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey

This book examines how interest groups in Turkey, including religious nationalists, neoliberal industrialists, and the military, promote and develop their particular worldviews through education and in school curricula. The aim is to explain how these competing groups define schoolchildren’s educational experiences and how mass schooling creates the contexts in which children make sense of knowledge, power, and social change.

The Pedagogical State offers an ethnographic case study that draws out the cultural and political processes by which education is reconfigured around the interests and understandings of different sectors in contemporary Turkish society. Using a wide array of sources, the author shows how a school system articulates a moral order at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and class. Exploring how this articulation plays itself out in a Turkish village provides a nuanced approach to the interplay of religious heritage, secularity, economic globalization, militarism, and identity politics in society at large.