Following the new changes, evolutionary concepts like natural selection will be removed from the high school curriculum, along with any mention of Darwin, the English naturalist whose theory has become a mainstay of biology classes around the world.

The education minister, Ismet Yilmaz, has praised the overhaul of the country’s curriculum as a necessary corrective that emphasizes a values-based education. Evolutionary biology, he had insisted, is too difficult for high schoolers to grasp and will be taught instead at the university level.

Moreover, Mr. Erdogan’s supporters note that debates over the teaching of evolution are hardly unique to Turkey, and have raged in other countries, including the United States. The theory of evolution is rejected by both Christian and Muslim creationists alike, who credit God with creating the planet and its creatures. Many religious conservatives in Turkey dismiss evolution as a reckless and unproven theory.

Evolution aside, the new curriculum has deeply angered secularists who say it underplays Ataturk’s contribution to modern Turkey. At the primary school level, classes are expected to truncate the teaching of his leadership role during, among other events, Turkey’s war of independence, out of which the modern Turkish republic was created in 1923 from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

The curriculum is also notable for whom it includes among Turkey’s enemies, including the Kurdish Workers’ Party, or PKK, long branded a terrorist group by Turkey and the United States; the Islamic State; and Fethullah Gulen, an influential United States-based cleric whose supporters run a global network of schools which provide a secular education. Mr. Erdogan blamed Mr. Gulen for last year’s attempted coup.

Mr. Yilmaz said in a recent news conference that it was essential to educate the new generation of Turks about the perils of Mr. Gulen’s movement.

Among the curriculum’s changes, the notion of jihad has garnered particular attention. Defenders of teaching jihad as a love of homeland argue that it is a spiritual concept that has been erroneously co-opted by extremists and wrongly associated with terrorism, and that progressive Muslim groups have been using more peaceful interpretations of the concept for centuries.