Studies in the context of the professionalisation of the teaching profession in Turkey mainly focus on policies and practices for teacher training in the Republican Period. However, the practices and policies in the last period of the Ottoman Empire for training modern teachers, which have an extensive historical background for the…

Prior to the 1980s, Turkey experienced a period of vicious political polarisation and even violent conflicts. The 1980 coup administration strived to reach an agreement regarding nationalism, religion, and Kemalism. Following the military coup of 1980, the Social Studies course was abandoned in secondary schools in 1985 and the National History,…

Georg Kerschensteiner (1854-1932) was a world-renowned proponent of the work school concept ("die Arbeitsschule"). His educational philosophy was adopted not only in Europe but also in other parts of the world, both in the fields of primary school and vocational education. This study aims to analyse how Georg Kerschensteiner's views on…

The pandemics and epidemics experienced in Turkey after the second quarter of the twentieth century had a profound impact on society and education. The "General Hygiene Law", which came into force in 1930 in an attempt to fight against increasing epidemic diseases, was a service provided by the state to improve health conditions in the…

It is commonly acknowledged that the roots of contemporary education in Turkey have been cultivated following the declaration of the republic in 1923 and previous accounts are rarely mentioned. This mindset is similar for several fields except for areas such as religious education and moral education. The research related to the history of…

The place religion should occupy in social life and how religious education should be conducted has so far been one of the controversial issues in Turkey. Considering the history of the Republican era, it may be said that religious education actively exists in the configuration of official education except for some periods. Religious education was…

Women's education becomes a prominent issue in the Ottoman Empire with the modern period, leading to the opening of the first modern public school for girls as a "rüsdiyye" (secondary) school. This article critically examines the curriculum of girls' "rüsdiyyes" from their foundation in 1859 until the beginning of the Second…

This paper examines how the religious education of Turkish children in the "old letters" became an area of everyday contestation between the state and families and communities in the late 1920s and 1930s. Since children were seen as the nation's future, state authorities were adamant about teaching the new generation the new alphabet and…

Nation-states needed various ideological apparatuses when they wanted to eliminate traditional loyalties to the pre-modern era and establish a new superordinate identity. As frequently emphasised in conceptual discussions, two elements among these ideological apparatuses come to the fore: historiography and education. While social values that…

With the advent of modern states, a mandatory relationship and interaction emerged between compulsory education, military service, and the practices of citizenship. Producing a loyal citizen required a disciplined, central, and compulsory education. In the nineteenth century when greatness was linked to armament, education was considered a vital…

The two decades following the establishment of the Turkish Republic witnessed the growth of the pervasive fear that vagrant and homeless children and child delinquents presented a threat to the physical, mental, and economic well-being of the nascent Turkish nation. Newspapers of the period regularly touched upon the issue, alerting the public and…

This study demonstrates how the cultural role of Ottoman women began to change during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as considering emerging conflicts due to their altering roles in society as they were educated in the "Darulmuallimat" (teachers' college for women) and acquired social positions as woman instructors. The…

In the early twentieth century many countries across the world established national student unions and sent representatives to the International Student Union. Believing this to be a fundamental need in a globalising world, the new Turkish state did not wait long before joining this union. In fact, several student associations in Turkey attended…

Turkey witnessed many educational and cultural policy innovations between 1938 and 1950. Realising strictly secular practices against religion and traditional culture pre-1946, political elites of the time aimed to construct a "humanistic culture" unique to Turkey. Educational policies were considered the most efficient tools in reaching…

This study has two purposes: the first is to present the general condition of public education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by showing the reformation process in educational institutes and teacher training, and the relationship between this process and the New Education movement in the Ottoman Empire; the second is to…