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Authored by Sam Kaplan, The Pedagogical State is a historically informed ethnography of the Turkish educational system in the post-1980 military-coup period. This period was characterized by the violent suppression of the political left, neoliberal restructuring of the Turkish economy, and the military's adoption of the "Turkish-Islamic Synthesis" as the state ideology. The Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, mixing ethnic nationalism with Sunni Islam, provided an ideological basis to reconfigure sociopolitical visions of identity and society and to engineer a docile citizenry in the post-1980 transition period. The reorganization of the educational system formed a key role in this project: school curricula were revised at all levels, religious-education classes were made mandatory, and, most important, hundreds of religious vocational schools were established all over Turkey within the first three years of military rule. The legacy of this period continues to dominate the charged national debates on education in Turkey.
The Pedagogical State specifically explores the ways in which different interest groups in Turkey, including religious nationalists, neoliberal secularists, and the military, competed with one another "to lobby their differences through the highly centralized educational system" (p. xvi) and insert their worldviews into the school curricula in this period. This contest over schooling, the book suggests, was primarily a struggle over the terms of citizenship, national identity, and moral order, given the key role of public education in sociopolitical reproduction and transformation. Weaving the findings of ethnographic research carried out between 1989 and 1991 in Yayla, a...