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 small town in the Cilicia Region of Southern Turkey, with a historically informed analysis of a wide range of textual sources, the study analyzes the implications and ramifications of the reconfiguration of the Turkish educational system at the local and national levels.

The book is organized into six chapters. Chapter 1 opens with an intriguing historical anecdote regarding the confrontation between an Ottoman governor and a heterodox local theologian, which led to the establishment of the first modern postprimary school in Yayla. Using this story as a vantage point into the historical debates on education during the emergence of Turkish modernity, Kaplan presents the theoretical underpinnings for his book's scrutiny of the pedagogical articulations of religious-national identity, citizenship, gender, class, and ethnicity. Chapter 2 traces the political effects of an educational report, which upon its release in 1990 unleashed a government crisis “involving its neoliberal industrialist sponsors and national religious public figures” (p. 19). The following three chapters are dedicated to the analysis of the different ways interest groups (including religious nationalists, secular industrialists, and the military) competed through the education system to claim “a singular Turkish culture for society at large” (p. 58). Finally, Chapter 6 illustrates the contradictory effects of the authoritarian curricula on schoolchildren. Kaplan argues that in their responses to corporal punishment, students articulate their longing for more egalitarian relations using the available discourses of progress and citizenship.

The Pedagogical State examines the relations between education, politics, and subjectivity at three analytically interrelated levels. On the first level, that of national politics, the author positions the polarized public debates on national education within the struggle for hegemony. Building on Philip Abrams' now classic postulation of the state as a political mask that confers legitimacy upon various political actors with competing interests and agendas, he demonstrates how the political groups in question exerted “their views in the public sphere under the sign of a unified personified view of the state” (p. 14). On the second level, that of textual politics, the book analyzes school textbooks to illustrate the reconfiguration of the school curriculum in a way that accommodates the changing imaginaries and norms of citizenship and national identity. In line with the anthropological turn toward the conception of citizenship as a matrix of inclusions and exclusions, it explores the pedagogical production of citizen-subjects in relation to various axes of social hierarchy and inequality, including class, gender, and ethnicity. On the third level, that of everyday politics, Kaplan investigates how the routine rituals and discourses to which children are exposed during their school years elicit particular desires, fears, and hopes and open new subject positions for children and adults within the local community of Yayla. Yet, compared to the thoroughness of the book's arguments on the first two levels, the argument at this level of analysis begs further ethnographic depth and focus. Even though Kaplan conducted ethnographic research in two elementary schools and one secondary school, the ethnographic focus of the book is not the classroom and the school as institutional spaces animated by webs of social and cultural relations. Most ethnographic observations in the book, such as those regarding a play staged for a wedding by the female graduates of a Qurʾan course or local people's memories of expelled Armenian neighbors, are only peripherally related to its main problematic. The relative absence of the voices and experiences of schoolchildren in the text constitutes a drawback for its analysis of the relationship between education and subject formation. Nevertheless, The Pedagogical State successfully illustrates the main contours of the national politics of education in the post-1980 period with reference to several key issues, including nationalism, religion, secularism, gender, and consumerism.

The Pedagogical State ends its analysis with the year 1991. Accordingly, it does not cover the political developments that have reconfigured the education system in Turkey since then, such as the 1997 military intervention and Turkey's European Union accession process. Nevertheless, the book is a significant contribution to an area of research that remains largely neglected in English-language scholarship: the role of education in the making of Turkish modernity, polity and national identity, and citizenship. This work would be of particular interest to scholars of secularism and political Islam in Turkey because the author's analysis of textbooks reveals how the Turkish military—long hailed as the stronghold of an exceptionally successful top-down secularization project—has contributed to the Islamization of political discourse through the injection of the “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis” into the school curricula.