Abstract

The educational system in the Turkish Republic during the Atatürk period was an instrument for change in many aspects of government and society. Following the establishment of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the Republican elite instituted secular, nationalist reforms in every system. Their goals in education were to teach Turkish schoolchildren the content of each discipline and the ideals which over time came to be known as Kemalism.

Chapter 1 of this study describes Turkish educational history from the late Ottoman period through the early years of the Republic. Chapter 2 discusses the Instruction and Pedagogy Committee (IPC) (Talim ve Terbiye Heyeti ), the Ministry of Education's organization in charge of curricula and textbook production, from its inception in 1926 until 1938. Chapter 3 examines production and content of school textbooks in a variety of disciplines. Chapter 4 analyzes the differences between textbook images and the Kemalist message.

This dissertation demonstrates three points. Through biographical sketches of the members of the IPC, it shows that these men had common educational backgrounds, experiences abroad, and exposure to Western ideas and pedagogical techniques, and that the Committee played a significant role in the shaping of Republican educational policy.

It also offers an alternative to the view of Kemalism as a fully conceptualized ideology. The school textbooks show that Kemalism was articulated gradually over the early years of the Republic and was not institutionalized in its fullest expression until the late 1930s. Expressing Kemalist ideals and views to the first and subsequent generations of Republican students was the primary task of the Instruction and Pedagogy Committee. Close examination of music, “Knowledge for Life,” reading, civics, history, and geography textbooks reveal the specific ways the Instruction and Pedagogy Committee accomplished this task.

Finally, the images conveyed through stories, poems, and pictures demonstrate an absence of complete identity between the Kemalist message and textbook content. It is this slippage that best illuminates Kemalist ideas not as a coherent revolutionary ideology from the outset of the Republic, but as a set of ideas that were gradually articulated and refined throughout the Atatürk period.