Turkey’s highest administrative court, the Council of State, announced Oct. 18 that the student oath will be reinstated at all primary schools. The student oath has been a controversial issue in Turkish politics for decades. In 1933, Minister of Education Resit Galip introduced the oath, which starts by declaring “I am a Turk” and ends with the statement “How proud is the one who can say ‘I am a Turk!’”
In September 2013, right after the Gezi protests and as part of the democratization package, Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced the “nationalist” oath would be removed. At the time, Erdogan said, “Lining up kids every morning and making them chant slogans from the 1930s, the Cold War and the era of the Iron Curtain is not nationalism.”