The Ministry of National Education (MEB) council, which serves as the highest educational advisory committee and is currently being held in Antalya, continues to address issues including "Teaching Programs and Weekly Course Schedule," "Improving Teachers' Quality," "Improving Education Administrators' Quality" and "School Security." Yesterday, council members also submitted their suggestions concerning elementary and secondary schools. The council decided that visual arts and music classes will be offered for at least two hours a week in elementary school, while first, second and third graders will have religious culture and moral knowledge lessons. Moreover, the council agreed that the religious culture and moral knowledge lesson program will feature a pluralistic approach. The council also decided to remove traffic safety, human rights, citizenship and democracy lessons from the curriculum of elementary school, adding the topics of these lessons to life sciences and social science lessons. The curriculum of first, second, third and fourth grades will also be simplified and science and social sciences lessons will be spread evenly after fourth grade in elementary school.A participant from the Ministry of Family and Social Policies suggested that the social gender equality lesson should be mandatory; however, the committee decided to adapt this suggestion by incorporating social gender equality as a unit into an already-existing lesson.The president of the committee, Hayati Akyol, took students' opinion on the weekly course hours in secondary school in consideration as well, as the committee could not come to an agreement whether it should be 30 or 35 hours. Students expressed their desire for 30 hours of schooling, which was accepted by the committee by unanimous vote. Furthermore, it was decided that mandatory courses will be offered for 25 hours, while elective courses will be offered for a total of five hours. The committee also unanimously agreed that either visual arts or music courses will be taught for two hours a week to secondary school students.Many European countries apply different course hours to elementary and secondary schools, and some of them even give first graders a free afternoon on Wednesdays. The weekly course hours vary between 25 to 30 hours in European countries and Turkey's weekly course hours for elementary and secondary schools are just as long, if not longer. Recent studies have revealed that when fewer weekly course hours are applied to elementary schools, students tend to like school more and lessons become more effective.