Nine-year-old Burak says his favourite subject is maths and that he loves writing in English. He wants to be a policeman when he grows up.
Smiling 11-year-olds Serra and Liyna, Burak's fellow pupils at the $10,000-a-year (Dh36,738) Fatih College primary school in Istanbul, chime in similarly confident English that their favourite subject is science and that they want to be doctors.
This is the 640-pupil school run by followers of Fethullah Gulen - a Turkish Muslim preacher who advocates a moderate Islam rooted in modern life, and whose teachings have inspired millions of Turks to forge a powerful socio-religious community active in publishing, charity and above all education.
Entrenched attitudes
But if the Gulen movement is seen by outsiders as a moderating force, it rings alarm bells for some Turks because it encapsulates the tensions between secular state and religious power.
Gulen, 67, has a reputation abroad as a Muslim who preaches tolerance and engagement with other faiths. But many in Turkey's secularist establishment say he has a political agenda and wants to create a religious state and a cadre of people to run it, a charge his followers vigorously deny.
Attitudes to the Gulen movement in Turkey are deeply entrenched and reflect a wider struggle for the country's identity and power base.
The movement has built up a network of some 800 schools around the world, teaching a full curriculum focusing on science and technology, and encouraging pupils to aim high.
In Turkey it follows the national curriculum and teaches only comparative religion according to strict outlines set by the state. However, most teachers adhere to Gulen's views.
"Some parents send their children here because they are religious. Others know the schools are very successful and want their children to go to university, while other parents are scared that if their children go to a government school they will pick up habits like smoking and drinking," said Ahmet Yalcin, an English teacher at Fatih College's high school.
Gulen's readiness to interact with other faiths took him to a meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1998 and he has also met Jewish and Orthodox leaders.
Turkey was founded as a fiercely secular state in 1923. A shift in society is now bringing to the fore a rising class of religious professionals, from which Gulen gleans much of his support, to the alarm of the old guard such as the army.
Gulen has been charged, and later acquitted, with plotting to destroy the secular state and establish Islamic law. He left for the United States shortly before the case began.
His supporters estimate there are 5 million Gulen sympathisers among Turkey's population of 70.5 million and people on all sides recognise the movement has grown in influence in a country where the military was long dominant.
"Fethullah Gulen is the first person in the history of Turkish Islamic thought who realised that the world is changing," said Kerim Balci, a columnist for Today's Zaman, a Turkish English-language newspaper close to the Gulen movement.
Political movement
"He changed the conservative discourse of scholars, changed it radically ... to look for the common ethical roots of all religions," he said.
His supporters say he has no political ambitions and backs the division of state and religion - but his critics think otherwise.
"It is a political movement ... and it has always been political. They think power is very important. They want to train an elitist class which will then turn Turkey into a centre of the religious world, Islamise the country," said Hakan Yavuz, a professor of political science at the University of Utah.