Primary education policies of AK Party governments (2002-2023)

The main purpose of this study is to analyze the primary education policies constructed by the political power in Turkey between 2002 and 2023 through laws, regulations, national education councils, circulars, discourses, and practices. Political powers may design education in line with their own ideologies, construct or reproduce the knowledge produced by education, or disregard it altogether. The power that produces knowledge can instrumentalize it for its ideological purposes. For these reasons, this thesis has been framed within the concepts of ideology and power. The impacts of power, its ideologies, and ideological transformations on the Turkish education system will be examined by exploring how political powers construct educational policies through discourses, symbols, signs, and concepts. Educational policies, which political powers regard as a tool of legitimization, have shown variations even within the practices of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), which single-handedly governed throughout the period defined as the thesis's scope. The policies pursued by the AK Party between 2002 and 2011 underwent significant ideological transformations and were reimplemented starting in 2011. Education is an open process, and it is most open to political power and its ideologies. Transformed education, in turn, shapes society, which sustains political power. Employing a descriptive method and text analysis technique, this study addresses the primary education policies implemented from the year the AK Party came to power until the 100th anniversary of the Republic. The concepts of conservative-democratic-religious, identified as the common characteristics of the desired generation, were attempted to be transmitted to the younger generations of society through primary education policies. In order to make this possible, legal regulations, government programs, council decisions, and development plans were functionalized.