The most stereotypic urban legend in Turkey is the myth that the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) compels all the citizens to a religious education. It is hard to find that idea odd if you have some prejudices. Didn't Erdoğan say he wanted a religious generation? Wasn't he the one reforming and reinforcing imam-hatip schools - schools primarily focused on teaching Islamic theology? Consequently, when you hear that the system entitled "transition from primary to secondary education" placed Istanbul's Chief Rabbi İzak Haleva's grandchild in an imam-hatip school this year, you can envision Turkey's current situation.However, this project of arguing that society is becoming more religious and people are compelled to receive religion-based education is total nonsense made up by the media organs of secular groups. The situation is quite different in reality. Let's try to comprehend the system first. Receiving high school education is compulsory in Turkey. So, the system's program automatically places each student in a school. Students have an opportunity to choose 15 schools. If the score they get from the exam is enough to enter one of these schools, they will be directly placed there. But if their score is not enough for any of the 15 schools of choice, the system certainly places them in a school and thus prevents anyone from being excluded from high school education.Students are not obliged to go to the schools they are placed in. Since many schools have vacancies, they can transfer from the system-determined school determined to another one. So, how do these schools have vacancies? The system managing the transitions to secondary education does not cover private schools and minority schools belonging to Christians and Jews. Students need to enroll in these schools personally. But still, they have to take the exam since the system is designed to guarantee that they are definitely placed in a school.Let's get to the accounting point of the matter. This year, 1.3 million students took the exam. Those who included at least one imam-hatip school in their top three choices were only of about 90,000. So, the demand for imam-hatip schools is quite low. It should also be underlined that the curricula of imam-hatip schools have all the same courses that are taught in other schools, but only include a few more additional theology lessons. The students who were sure to enroll in private schools took the exam but did not use their right to choose 15 schools. Furthermore, the system distributed those persons among many schools, some of which are imam-hatip schools, some of which are not.At this point, it would be wise to ask, how many students were placed in imam-hatip schools by the system? The answer is 209. Among the 1.3 million students, only 209 were placed in imam-hatip schools. But the reason for it is that the aforementioned students did not make it into their preferred schools and as such all of those students would go to private schools and not imam-hatips - including the two Armenians and the grandchild of a chief Rabbi.In brief, there is no evidence that would make us infer that the government is forcefully making society more religious. But the secularist strata psychologically wish the government is doing that. They think they could condemn and humiliate the government more easily as it becomes more Islamist. They also know that such incitements or affirmations toward the government will be accepted as fact hastily by Western countries. Because an allergy to the AK Party can be clearly seen today in the Western world, the West is ready to accept any "data" against the government without further analysis.As a result, a fictional "imam-hatip threat" has been constructed and this idea becomes real and comes into existence as it circulates within the secularist strata, which has chosen ignorance. So, the West, which has difficulty understanding Turkey, is surprised when it hears that an "authoritarian government" receives 50 percent of the public's votes, and from there they come up with the argument that the public is probably ignorant.