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Monuments to the Republic: School as anationalising discourse in TurkeySabiha Bilgiaa Elementary Education, Abant Izzet Baysal University, Bolu,TurkeyPublished online: 02 Oct 2013.

To cite this article: Sabiha Bilgi (2014) Monuments to the Republic: School as a nationalisingdiscourse in Turkey, Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, 50:3,356-370, DOI: 10.1080/00309230.2013.833272

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Monuments to the Republic: School as a nationalising discourse inTurkey

Sabiha Bilgi*

Elementary Education, Abant Izzet Baysal University, Bolu, Turkey

(Received 17 February 2013; final version received 1 August 2013)

This article examines the cultural construction of the school in Turkey in relationto the construction of Turkish nation-ness. By looking at how the modern schoolwas fit together with a network of interrelated discourses available in early twen-tieth-century Turkey, the article investigates the ways in which the schoolbecame an object of thought in support of narrating and imagining Turkishnation-ness. In the article, I argue that the school was pivotal in the imaginationand institution of Turkey not only literally but also symbolically. Juxtaposedwith a radically contrasting image of the traditional educational establishment ofthe Ottoman dynastic past called mahalle mektebi, the school was appropriatedby the Republican elite as a statement of modernity, national character and atotal break from the Ottoman past. Giving a visual expression to the newregime’s aspirations for the society, the school, with its very architecture, layoutand disciplinary and hierarchical organisation, functioned as a clear symbol ofenlightenment, civility, order and progress.

Keywords: school; nation; modernisation; Ottoman past; Turkey

Introduction

This article is about the cultural construction of the school in Turkey. It investigatesthe formation of the school in Turkey as an object of thought in support of narratingand imagining Turkish nation-ness.1 The article approaches the school as a discur-sive space in which multiple, overlapping and historically constructed discourseswere assembled/disassembled in order to give direction and purpose to the organisa-tion of schooling. It looks at how this process of assemblage/disassemblage con-structed the possibility of schooling in Turkey and made the fabrication of Turkeyas an “imagined community” possible.

*Email: sbilgi@ibu.edu.tr

1This article represents part of the PhD dissertation of the author. I use the term “nation-ness”to dispute the concept of the nation as a natural, fixed and discrete entity in favour of theconcept of the nation as a historical and cultural artefact that is always in the making,interconnected and fragmentary. I deploy the term “nation-ness” to refer to a specific and cul-turally and historically contingent explanation of human existence that forms subjectivitiesand informs actions.© 2013 Stichting Paedagogica Historica

Paedagogica Historica, 2014Vol. 50, No. 3, 356–370, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2013.833272

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This article is informed by the concept of the nation as “an imagined commu-nity”.2 If nation is, as Benedict Anderson suggests, an “imagined community”whose existence and survival is dependent on a variety of historically and culturallyconstructed discourses that form individuals into the seam of a collective narrative,the school is among the most important of these discourses. The school is not sim-ply a monolithic bureaucratic institution.3 It is also “an image and a vindication ofitself, its ideal and its missions”.4 The meaning, values, expectations and functional-ity attributed to the school are central to imagining the nation because they embodycertain cultural theses about human existence and shape the way in which individu-als perceive and relate to themselves, others and the world. As both an embodimentof and a possibility for particular selectivity of norms, values and principles, theschool provides an excellent entry point into the formation of a national imaginary.

In order to examine the ways in which the school was formed as an object ofthought and reflection in support of narrating and imagining Turkish nation-ness,my strategy is to look at how the modern school was fit together with a variety ofother discourses available in early twentieth-century Turkey and gained its intelligi-bility. In this aim, I direct my attention at the Turkish modernisation project that waslaunched to modernise and nationalise the predominantly agrarian Anatolian societyfrom the 1920s. In the first section, by drawing on my genealogical reading of edu-cational acts, official reports and speeches, memories of school days and childhood,images, novels and secondary sources on the history of Turkish education, I examinehow the school joined the different but interrelated discourses of the early Republi-can era and became intelligible. These discourses include peasantry, republicanism,nation, modernity, history, the west, culture and the Ottoman past. The question of“a national education” – a recurrent issue since the establishment of the republic – isthe main focus of the second section. In this section, I argue that the school wasconstituted as one of the main axes along which the qualities of Turkish nation-nesswere defined. The last section explicates the role played by the school in constitutingthe moral discourse of nation-ness. It shows how the modern school was juxtaposedwith a radically contrasting image of the traditional educational establishment of theOttoman past called mahalle mektebi and became a representation of modernity,civility, progress and national character.

The Turkish modernisation project: Negotiating time and space in earlyrepublican Turkey5

In widespread accounts, the establishment of the Turkish republic in 1923 is imag-ined as a sudden and total break with the Ottoman past. Any mention of the abrupt

2Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism (New York: Verso, 1983).3Ian Hunter, “Assembling the School,” in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism, and the Rationalities of Government, eds. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, andNikolas Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 143–66.4Pierre Caspard, “The School in Crisis, Crisis in the Memory of School. School, Democracy,and Economic Modernity in France from the Late Middle Ages to the Present Day,”Paedagogica Historica 34, no. 3 (1998): 691.5“Early republican era” is used here to refer to the establishment of the Turkish nation-statein 1923 and the subsequent implementation of a set of reforms in order to restructure thesociety. The significance of the early republican era lies in its setting of the discursive stagefor present-day Turkey.

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change from the imperial Ottoman State to the Turkish republic leads above all to adiscussion of the development of the modern school system and the argument thatbefore the nation-state was established, there was no state-run modern school in thesense we know, only traditional Islamic establishments of education such as mahallemektebi or medrese. Yet in fact, the introduction of the modern institution of theschool in Turkey goes back to the eighteenth-century Ottoman era. Introduced aftermilitary defeats and mostly targeted by the elite, the institution of the modern schoolin the Ottoman era aimed to produce well-trained and loyal employees for the mili-tary and bureaucracy. While the modern school did not appear suddenly with therepublic, the change that came with the republic involved more than a mere expan-sion of the school to the masses, with an added nationalist ingredient in the curricu-lum. Most significantly, the change involved putting the school in charge of definingthe moral discourse of Turkey. Presented as a Republican concept par excellence,the school was identified as a specific national attribute, and became an exemplar of“national revival” and “ambitions”. Expanded over the landscape of Turkey after1923, the school became a significant and visible element of the symbolic world ofnationhood that communicated the ideals and values of the new order of society tothe masses in a direct, immediate and unmediated way.

Late Ottoman modernisation movement

The Ottoman Empire was the one of the largest and longest lasting empires in his-tory. Founded in northwestern Anatolia in 1299, the Empire reached its greatestextent in the late sixteenth century, coming to encompass much of southeast Europe,western Asia and North Africa. The Ottoman state was ruled in the name of thedynasty. Identical to the personality of the sultan, the state was absolute and exer-cised its authority over its subjects through its military and civil bureaucratic offi-cials, for whom the monopoly of vital resources, legitimacy and authority wasreserved. The Ottoman state was theocratic. After the possession of the Caliphate,6

Islam became a means that was beyond any societal, worldly or human in order tojustify the Ottoman state’s absolute power. The category “Turk” was used to denotea variety of peasant tribes in Anatolia. The Ottoman elite called themselves“Ottomans”, not Turks.

Continuous military defeats to the Europeans and territorial retreat and retrench-ment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ushered in an era of reform in thehistory of the Ottoman Empire. In this period, the idea of the superiority of theEuropean societies began to gain acceptance among the Ottoman ruling elite. Mod-ernisation – that meant westernisation – was considered essential in order to savethe state. The presumed superiority of the west and, accordingly, what constituted“modern” and “backward” in the late Ottoman Empire era, was seen as institutionaland administrational. The modernisation movement that started with the adoption ofwestern military techniques, weaponry, training, and organisation involved later,with Tanzimat Fermanı (the Reform Edict) in 1839, modifying the existing adminis-trative, judicial and educational institutions to resemble western models. The lateOttoman educational reforms, for instance, included the establishment of naval andarmy engineering schools for the training of military officers in 1776 and 1795,respectively. The founding of the Military Academy and the School of Medicine in

6Rulership of Islam.

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1826 was followed by the establishment of the school of administration (Mülkiye) in1859. During this era of Tanzimat (1839–1876), the idea of free primary educationfor all began to be articulated by the Ottoman state elite. In 1846, the Ministry ofPublic Instruction was created, and the state converted the schools of non-Muslimsubjects that were financed by private support or by charitable grants into state-financed primary schools. The 1850s and 1860s witnessed the establishment of post-primary secular state schools (Rüştiye, İdadi and Sultani) in İstanbul and many pro-vincial centres. Along with secular state schools, the traditional Islamic schools,such as mahalle mektebi and medrese and foreign and missionary schools, continuedto operate within the territory of the Ottoman State.7

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), the founder of the republic, and his entou-rage, known as Kemalists, developed “the last and most successful response” to theproblem of saving the state.8 According to Atatürk and his supporters, who wereeducated in the most westernised schools of the Ottoman Empire, unless the statewas renovated radically in accordance with the principles of citizenship, nationalismand secularism, it was doomed to death.9 After defeat in the First World War, thenationalists, under the leadership of Atatürk, organised the national liberation war(1919–1922). The ensuing liberation war that secured the borders delimiting theTurkish state to Anatolia and a small portion of Thrace was followed by the abolitionof the Ottoman sultanate in 1922, which officially ended the Ottoman Empire. On 29October 1923, the character of the new regime was announced as republican, and itwas stated that sovereignty belonged to the nation. Following the proclamation ofthe republic, the Kemalist project of modernity, which was fundamentally educa-tional in nature, was launched to create a modern republican citizenry in Anatolia.10

The Anatolian peasant – “the true owner and master of Turkey”

The Kemalist project of modernity was one of the greatest state-sponsored social en-gineerings of the twentieth century, and perhaps one of the most “authoritarian”ones.11 Aiming to “westernise” and “nationalise” society from the 1920s, the project

7See Şerif Mardin, “Religion and Secularism in Turkey,” in Atatürk: Founder of a ModernState, eds. Ali Kazancıgil and Ergun Özbudun (London: C. Hurst & Co. Ltd. 1981), FatmaMüge Göçek, “Ethnic Segmentation, Western Education, and Political Outcomes: Nineteenth-century Ottoman Society,” Poetics Today 14, no. 3 (1993): 507–38, and Yahya Akyüz, TürkEğitim Tarihi: M.Ö. 1000- M.S. 2010 (Ankara: Pegem Akademi, 2010). Please provide pageranges for these references.8Ali Kazancıgil, “The Ottoman-Turkish State and Kemalism,” in Atatürk: Founder of a Mod-ern State, eds. Ali Kazancıgil and Ergun Özbudun (London: C. Hurst & Co. Ltd., 1981), 38.9Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, for example, was born in Selonika (now Thessaloníki, Greece) andattended the military middle school there. Later, he entered the Manastır Military HighSchool. An important agricultural, commercial, cultural and educational centre of the era,Manastır (now Bitola, Macedonia) had a number of prestigious schools. The city was a siteof competition for Ottoman and many different foreign and missionary schools. See BernardLory-Alexandre Popoviç, “Balkanlar’ in kavşağındaki Manastır 1816–1918,” Modernleşmesüresinde Osmanlı Kentleri, ed. Paul Dumont and François Georgeon (İstanbul: Tarih VakfıYayınları, 1999): 60–77. After graduating from military high school in Manastır, Atatürk pro-gressed to the Military Academy in İstanbul.10Anatolia, geographically referring to the Asian region of Turkey, represented, in the repub-lican era, the heartland of Turkish identity and the homeland of the Turkish nation.11For his discussion of “authoritarian modernity”, see James Scott, Seeing Like a State: HowCertain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-versity Press, 1996).

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involved a sweeping social engineering project that targeted all aspects of social lifein the newly established territory of Turkey. Introducing a set of new rules and regu-lations, the project sought to bring about enormous changes in people’s daily lifepractices and worldview towards constituting the universal subject of the newlyestablished Republic.

Rogers Brubaker’s term, “nationalising states”, is helpful in inquiring into cul-tural and political practices in early twentieth-century Turkey. Brubaker defines “na-tionalising states” as states where the ruling elite make claims in the name of a“core nation” that is thought to be the “owner” of the state, but conceived as weakin terms of its “language, culture, demographic position, economic welfare and polit-ical hegemony”. This weakness provides a justification for “the ‘remedial’ or ‘com-pensatory’ project of using state power to promote the core nation’s specific (andheretofore inadequately served) interests”.12

The object of “remedial” social engineering in Turkey was the Anatolian villageand the peasant of Anatolia. An overwhelming majority of the population (morethan 80%) was, at that time, living in remote and rural areas of the country. Callingthe war-torn, poor and predominantly agrarian society of Anatolia “the true owner[s]and master[s] of Turkey”, Atatürk gave the following speech in his address to theTurkish Grand Assembly a year before the proclamation of the republic:

Let us gather together, with shame and reverence, before this exalted master, whoseblood we have spilt for seven centuries in different regions of the globe, whose boneswe have left behind in those lands, the fruits of whose toil we have expropriated andsquandered, whom we have requited with scorn and contempt and whose kindness andsacrifices we have repaid with ingratitude, insolence, oppression, and the desire todegrade him into a bondsman.13

The republican elite’s interest in Anatolia and idealisation of the Anatolian peas-ant as “the true master of the country” inscribed fear of the Anatolian peasant asdangerous to the future of the newly established republic. The illiterate and impover-ished Anatolian peasant, constituting the majority of the population, was seen asincapable of taking advantage of the rights the republic offered and of handling theresponsibilities the republic imposed. The cause of the predicament of the Anatolianpeasant, who was seen as needing help, was attributed to the governance of theIslamic–Ottoman Empire.

The nationalist discourse was built on the negation of Islamic–Ottoman heritage.Orientalist representations of Turks as the significant other of European identity –fanatic, backward, patriarchal and ignorant – played an important role in the nearlywholesale rejection of the Islamic–Ottoman heritage. In order to break this image ofTurks signifying those from the Ottoman Empire as much as those from the newnation of “Turkey”, the Republican elite imagined a pure and authentic Turkishnational culture rooted in the eras of the ancient Anatolian civilisations and the pre-Islamic Central Asian history. It was maintained that pre-Islamic Turkish nationalculture was tolerant, liberal, democratic and progressive.14 The modernisation

12Rogers Brubaker, “Nationalizing States in the Old ‘New Europe’ – and the New,” Ethnicand Racial Studies 19, no. 2 (1996): 431.13As quoted in Türkkaya Ataöv, “The Principles of Kemalism,” The Turkish Yearbook, XX(1980–1981): 31.14See, for example, Samuel Kaplan, “Education and the Politics of National Culture in aTurkish Community, Circa 1990” (PhD diss., The University of Chicago, 1996).

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project aimed to ensure the survival of the “pure and timeless” national culture andits protection from the influences of the Islamic–Ottoman past.

The school was central to the project of rehabilitating the Anatolian peasantfrom the influences of the Islamic–Ottoman past. Elevated by prime minister andlater president İsmet İnönü15 to “the cause of being human, being nation”, theschool was to teach the Anatolian peasants to become proper political actors. Theschool was, Hasan Âli Yücel wrote, “to make our true master a master”.16 Atatürkemphasised the same republican mission of promoting the education of the peasantas “the true owner and master of Turkey”. His formulation of republican educationalpolicy in the following quote also purported explicitly to distinguish the republicanreformations of education from those of the late Ottoman Empire:

Those who have governed our nation for centuries have longed for the expansion ofeducation. Yet, since they could not have freed themselves from imitating the East andWest to fulfill their ambitions, the result has not been having the nation rescued fromignorance. In the face of this sad reality, the main foundation of our educational policyshould be as follows: I stated before that the peasant is the true owner and main com-ponent of this country. It is this peasant who has been denied the light of education.Accordingly, the central aim of our education policy is primarily to eradicate the exist-ing ignorance.17

Nationalising the modern school

The need for a “national education” emerged as a central concern in the educationaldiscussions of the early republican era. It was maintained that the Ottoman educa-tional initiatives were faulty because they were not in conformity with the presumed“national essence”. It was necessary for the republican school, as promoted by Ata-türk, to be a manifestation and embodiment of Turkish character:

I believe that the modes of education and instruction that were followed up to todayare one of the most important factors in the history of our nation’s deterioration. There-fore, when I speak of a national education program, I mean an education that is com-patible with our national character and history and completely removed from thesuperstitions of the past, from the foreign ideas that have no relevance to the qualitiesof our character, and from the effects stemming from the East and the West.18

In his talk addressed to teachers in the Teachers Congress of 1925, İsmet İnönü,the prime minister of the era, also called insistently for a “national education”:

We want a national education. What does it mean? We can understand this best bytalking about what it is not. If you ask us what the opposite of national education is,we can answer: National education is not a religious or international education… Oursystem will demonstrate in time that religious education does not conflict with nationaleducation and that the both two educations manifest themselves best and purest in their

15İsmet İnönü served twice as prime minister (1923–24, 1925–37) during Atatürk’s presi-dency. After the death of Atatürk, he served as the second president of Turkey (1938–50).16As quoted in Canan Yücel Erolat, Köy Enstitüleri Dünyasından Hasan Âli Yücel’e Mektu-plar (İstanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2007), 7.17As quoted in Gezer, Mustafa Kemal ulusal eğitim: Köy Enstitüleri, 12.18As quoted in Gezer, Mustafa Kemal ulusal eğitim: Köy Enstitüleri, 10.

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own ways. As far as international education; in fact, even religious education is a kindof international education. Our education will be our own and for ourselves.19

Nationalism and internationalism are, in Brubaker’s term, “practical categories”20

used to achieve certain objectives. The discourse of “a national education” was cru-cial for the Kemalist elite and statesmen who were obligated first to differentiatethemselves from late Ottoman governance. What distinguished the republic from thelate Ottoman era was, Yücel wrote, that “those who sought to revitalize the Western-ization movement under the Ottoman Empire did not properly understand the Westor the strengths that lie within the soul of the Turkish nation”.21

Ziya Gökalp, the issue of nation-ness and education

The first attempt to search for a Turkish identity for the people of the OttomanEmpire in the light of the modern nationalist ideals appeared with the leadership ofZiya Gökalp (1876–1924), whom Atatürk called the father of his ideas. Gökalp, asociologist, shared with other members of the Ottoman ruling elite concern regard-ing how to foster loyalty to the Ottoman state among its subjects and prevent aneventual collapse of the Empire. In his response to this question, Gökalp rejectedtwo other proposals, namely Ottomanism and Islamism, and advocated national self-identification instead.22

Education was of particular interest to Ziya Gökalp who incorporated the Ger-man idea of kultur into the Turkish intellectual tradition. In the intellectual circles ofTurkey, the German concept of kultur, which was developed as a response to theFrench concept of civilisation, had its strongest hold. As discussed by Norbert Elias,these two terms seem to be distinct, but they are by no means mutually exclusive.23

The concept of civilisation expresses a “western” superiority over older or “primi-tive” contemporary societies in terms of “the level of its technology, the nature of itsmanner, the development of its scientific knowledge or view of the world and muchmore”.24 To a certain extent, this concept minimises national differences. It is not aspecific national attribute but describes “a progress or at least the result of a pro-gress”. Anyone could/should reach civilisation through reason, emulation and educa-tion. The German concept of kultur, in contrast, places special stress on nationaldifferences. It expresses not a process that is to be participated in but the inner

19As quoted in Hasan Âli Yücel: Köy Enstitüleri ve köy eğitimi ile ilgili yazıları-konuşmaları,121. Prime Minister İnönü’s statements on how they perceived national education show thatthe Kemalist elite did not envisage an eventual exclusion of Islam from the definition ofTurkish nationalism. Rather, they tried to create a reformed and “domesticated” version ofIslam subordinated to the state and secular nationalist ideology.20Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in theNew Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).21Hasan Âli Yücel, “Cumhuriyet maarifinin prensipleri,” in Hasan Âli Yücel: Köy Enstitülerive köy eğitimi ile ilgili yazıları-konuşmaları, 116.22See Taha Parla, The Social and Political Thought of Ziya Gökalp 1876–1924 (Leiden: E. J.Brill, 1985) and Üner Daglier, “Ziya Gökalp on Modernity and Islam: The Origins of anUneasy Union in Contemporary Turkey,” Comparative Civilizations Review 57 (2007): 53–69.23Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The Development of Manners, trans. Edmund Jeph-cott (New York: Urizen, 1978).24Ibid., 4.

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essence and “self-consciousness of a nation which had constantly to seek out andconstitute its boundaries anew… and again and again had to ask itself: ‘What isreally our identity?’”.25 The school was configured in Turkey as a quest for an imag-ined national identity. This configuration entailed the identification of the school asa specific national attribute.

Gökalp’s definition of nation relied on culture (hars), which was differentiatedfrom civilisation (medeniyet). By culture, Gökalp meant a set of moral and aestheticideals, sentiments and attitudes peculiar to each nation. Civilisation, on the otherhand, was international, referring to scientific knowledge and technology. Accordingto Gökalp, in order to progress into modernity, Turks had to recover their authenticnational culture, which included but was not limited to Islam, and integrate it withwestern civilisation.

In Terbiyenin Sosyal ve Kültürel Temelleri I (Social and Cultural Bases of Educa-tion I), originally published in 1917, Gökalp’s main agenda was to highlight thenecessity of organising the educational endeavour in a national manner. He claimedthat “if education were national, it would be inevitably modern as well”26 and statedthat “education simply means inculcating the national culture into the soul of chil-dren”,27 whom he called “anational” (lâ-milli),28 and “bringing them up in accor-dance with the national type”.29 Education had to be national, according to Gökalp,because it meant the inculcation of national culture. In his definition of education ascreating a “true individual” who was “a representative of the national culture”,30 heclearly maintained that there was no “individual” outside and before the realm of thenation:

National individuals are the only true individuals; the individual has a character (indi-viduality) only if s/he becomes a representative of the national culture. Anational (lâ-milli) individuals are the newborns; non-national (gayr-i milli) individuals are thosecharacterless people whom we call degenerate. Character comes into existence with thenation. We call this culture. The individual has a character in proportion to the amounts/he takes from this culture. Thus, the more the individual gets nationalized, the mores/he builds character.31

The unification of education law (Tevhid-i Tedrisad Kanunu)

Gökalp was the inspiration for the most important reforms in the early republicanera. The passing of the Unification of Education Law (Tevhid-i Tedrisad Kanunu)was without doubt one of these reforms. With this law, all educational institutions inthe newly established territory of Turkey were united and brought under the controlof the Ministry of Education. Approved on 3 March 1924, this law took its place inthe chronology of Turkish modernisation history as a celebratory date, since it wasthought to be the foremost critical step taken towards the reorganisation of the exist-ing educational endeavour in a national manner.

25Ibid., 6.26Ziya Gökalp, Terbiyenin sosyal ve kültürel temelleri (İstanbul: MEB Yayınları, 1917,1997), 63.27Ibid., 28.28Ibid., 47.29Ibid., 52.30Ibid., 51.31Ibid., 51.

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The enactment and enforcement of the unification law and the other educationalpolicies of the era both reflected and impelled the sensibilities and attitudes concern-ing the state as well as education during the early republican years. Since educationhad such critical importance, deciding the fate of the nation, it was to be entrustedto the state. Taking control even over religious instruction, which previously was lar-gely a local initiative, the state, by means of this law, asserted its authority in educa-tion. Building upon a unified system and reliant on the state, school-derivededucation came to be defined as not just the only legitimate form of education; italso came to be seen as an expression of the national identity. It would be not toostrong to say that the school in the early republican era functioned in the same wayas the monuments and statues. With its very architecture, layout and disciplinaryand hierarchical organisation, the school became a direct, immediate and unmediatedway of communicating the ideals and values of the republic to the masses. With itsvery physical (visual) presence, the school was an embodiment in itself, that “saysand communicates; therefore it educates”.32 As a clear symbol of civility, order,enlightenment and progress in the towns and villages, the school was appropriatedas a spectacle expressing the self-image and aspirations of the republic.

The unification law led to the closure of the Ministry of Foundations and of such“traditional” Ottoman educational institutions as medrese and mahellle mektebi oper-ating under the control of that Ministry. The same law also gave the Ministry ofEducation responsibility for the task of training students for such positions as reli-gious functionaries (i.e. imam) or Koran course instructors in newly established andstate-managed İmam-Hatip schools (preacher-prayer schools), which were designedas elective secondary vocational schools. In addition, shortly after the promulgationof the unification law, certain regulations for the missionary and minority schoolswere introduced.33 For example, the dissemination of religious propaganda in theseschools was prohibited, and they were to remove all religious symbols in theirbuildings. The display of photos of Atatürk and the national flag, with certain sizeregulations, was another obligation for these schools if they were to keep operating.Turkish language, history and geography courses were to be integrated into thecurriculum, and they were to be taught by Turkish teachers appointed by theMinistry.34

The unification of education law was not passed without resistance. In responseto growing disapproval, Hamdullah Suphi, the first Minister of Education of therepublic, gave a speech including the following words, which resonate with the idealying behind and communicated through the law:

I know one and only one education; that education is state-education. The directionmust be one, the command must be one, the aim must be one, the way of life andprogress must be one.35

32Antonio Viñao, “History of Education and Cultural History: Possibilities, Problems, Ques-tions,” in Cultural History and Education: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling,eds. Thomas. S. Popkewitz, Barry M. Franklin and Miguel A. Pereyra (New York: Routl-edgeFalmer, 2001), 125–50, 131–2.33Misionary schools included, for example, those schools opened by American, Italian, andGerman misionaries. Minority schools were the schools run by non-Muslim minorities suchas Greeks, Gregorian Armenians, Armenian Catholics, Jews and Bulgarians.34İlhan Başgöz, Türkiye’nin Eğitim Çıkmazı ve Atatürk (İstanbul: Pan Yayıncılık, 2005).35As quoted in Mustafa Ergün, Atatürk Devri Türk Eğitimi II, http://www.egitim.aku.edu.tr/ata2.htm (accessed Febrary 14, 2013).

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School as a symbol of the new era

In the early republican period, the idea of “a national education”, for which Gökalpprovided a basis, involved considering the school as an expression of the nationalcharacter. The question of national “self” entails the question of national “other”.The Republican school defined itself in contrast to the established traditions of Isla-mic and Ottoman education. The mahalle mektebi (also called sıbyan mektebi) ofthe Ottoman educational past was constituted as the “other” of the Republicanschool and, accordingly, of the national “self”. Juxtaposed with a radically contrast-ing image of the mahalle mektebi, the republican school was given the designationof the novelty, rationality, and progressiveness of the republican era. As a number ofschool memoirs brought together by Bekir Onur36 and Ali Birinci and İsmail Kara37

depict, the modern school was everything the mahalle mektebi was not: scientific,rational, hygienic, humane and representative of the new era.

One of the main contrasts was between the location of the school and itsarchitectural features. The removal of the school physically from the precinct ofthe mosque and any other Islamic sites marked it as novel. The mahalle mektebiwere mostly irregular local initiatives. The mahalle (neighbourhood) communitiesgenerally used the nearest mosque for education purposes, and the preacher (hocaor imam) of the mosque usually assumed the role of teacher. There was neither afixed semester, nor any compulsory attendance, nor any school registrationrequirement. Children generally started mektep at 5–7 and stayed there until theage of 12–13.

According to Şerafettin Mağmumi (1869–1927), who studied medicine in Parisand served as a physician in many villages throughout Anatolia, the very physicalstructure of the mektep occupying the precinct of the mosque was an important sig-nifier of the ignorance and irrationality thought to exist in the Anatolian Turkish vil-lage. Mağmumi expressed his admiration of the physical features of schools whichhe observed in his travels across Europe as follows:

One of the apparent characteristics of the village is uneducatedness. There is no singlebuilding in these villages that deserves to be called school. Yes, but there are somestructures that people call school. But, don’t ask about their location. They are either adark and barn-like structure or mostly a room called teneşirhane that is adjacent to themosque and used to wash the corpse, a coffin is standing in the corner of the room,etc. In the other corner, three to five children are learning how to perform prayers.Most of teachers were even unable to write their names. … Whereas, when you comenear a Christian Village, a two-story building always catches your attention from a dis-tance. No need to ask. It is, that’s for certain, a school. Herein are classrooms withorderly desks, maps hanging on the walls, shapes. Most of the teachers are even capa-ble of teaching high school science.38

Defined by Mağmumi as “dark and barn-like structures”, some mahalle mektep-leri were separate buildings. They were mostly built of stone, and they usually con-sisted of a single room and had a tomb of their founder next to them. The building’slayout was based on a square or circular plan and it was covered by a dome and asmall portico. These “Ottoman–Islamic looking” buildings became an object of criti-

36Bekir Onur, Türkiye’de çocukluğun tarihi (Ankara: İmge Kitapevi, 2005).37Ali Birinci and İsmail Kara, Bir eğitim tasavvuru olarak Mahalle-Sıbyan Mektepleri:Hatıralar - yorumlar – tetkikler (İstanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 2005).38As quoted in Onur, Türkiye’de çocukluğun tarihi, 348.

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cism for violating rational design principles and the needs of the child. HüseyinRahmi Gürpınar (1864–1944), a novelist and journalist who also served as a mem-ber of parliament in the early years of the Turkish republic, between 1935 and 1943,described the mahalle mektebi he attended in İstanbul as follows:

The building was stone, in a small medrese architecture form. The walls are thick; thewindows are small; there are no stairs. The building is level with the ground…We usedto get drowned in the gloominess of this shadowy tomb-like building…You go throughthe exterior door into a narrow garden. A weak, diseased, and poor tree welcomes youwhen you step into this sunless place between the high walls. A foul and strong odorcoming out of the public restroom at a small distance tells you about the hygienic con-dition of the mektep. The structure is a rectangular building, with one of its short sidesfacing the street. The other short side is completely deaf [having no windows]. Thebuilding has only one door placed on one of the long sides. The opposite long sidefaces the graveyard of the Yakup Ağa Mosque. We, little ones, are at the same levelwith the dead.39

Light and airy versus gloomy and airless were the key terms used in the schoolmemoirs, underscoring the binary opposition between the modern school and themahalle mektebi. Constructed as the abject of the modern school, consisting ofbright and well-ventilated classrooms, the “dark”, “low-ceilinged” and “airless” mek-tep was accused of being unhygienic and unhealthy for children. Sadiye Tutsak, forexample, was blunt in her criticism of the mektep:

Children at the sıbyan mektepleri and at those new method schools opened later werebeing educated in badly odorous, humid, and unsanitary classrooms. In this unhealthyenvironment, students were taking class without having any recess. Exposed tomalaria, tuberculosis, smallpox, rubella, etc. at their very young age, these children,even though they had recovered from the sickness, were still doomed to live a diseasedlife because of their weakened bodies due to these illnesses.40

In addition to the provision of large windows, sufficient light and air, corridorsand an ample schoolyard, another property of the new school was emphasised in thememoirs to stress its healthy, hygienic and civilised character: orderly rows of desksand chairs. Considering the orderly rows of raised desks and chairs to be an impor-tant characteristic of the ideal school and schooling life, İrfan Orfa (1908–1970)mentioned:

in the classroom [of the mektep], there was neither a desk, nor a chair. In other words,there was nothing to signify that it was an educational setting. Twenty to thirty studentsused to sit cross-legged on the mats on the floor. The hoca [teacher] too, used to sit onthe floor. But, on a larger mat and in a corner away from children.41

The new classroom, on the other hand, had orderly rows of desks and chairs placedin front of the teacher, whose platform was elevated from the floor to invoke higherstatus and respect.

The centrality of the architecture and internal design of the school in the con-struction of the national “self” was connected to other practices and materials of theschool. For example, in the new school, “there was a big blackboard… there were

39As quoted in Onur, Türkiye’de çocukluğun tarihi, 386.40As quoted in Onur, Türkiye’de çocukluğun tarihi, 324.41As quoted in Onur, Türkiye’de çocukluğun tarihi, 358.

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maps hanging on the walls”.42 And there were books: “There were pictures in thebooks. Their scripture was beautiful. Most of the books [were] hard cover. Theywere not like those yellow-sheet and lithographed books in the mahalle mektebi”.43

The availability of textbooks and the prevalence of reading were contrasted with themethods of the mahalle mektebi, where the emphasis was not so much on literacybut on oral transmission.44 The availability of textbooks to “read” and their worldlycontent were credited with enabling the child to seek personal improvement andsocial advancement as a whole. The centrality of textbook reading in the Republicanschool entailed another marked contrast with the mahalle mektebi in terms of thestyle and the content of teaching.

The mahalle mektebi was designed to teach Arabic letters and cover basic reli-gious texts. As the textbooks were in Arabic, recitation and blind memorisation wasthe objective. Hasan Âli Yücel, remembering his mektep days, wrote: “What a diffi-cult task it was, God! If we knew Arabic, or if we were an Arab kid, it would get ashalf as easy to do this task”.45 The difficulty of Arabic made it a symbol of illiter-acy, obscurantism and ignorance. After adoption of the Latin alphabet in 1928,Nation Schools (Millet Mektepleri) were established all over the country to teach thenew alphabet in a nationwide adult literacy programme. The Nation Schools repre-sented the will of the Turkish state to emancipate the nation from the supposedoppressive bondage of Arabic scripts. With respect to the Nation Schools’ use ofevery available site (from the mosque to coffeehouses) in order to teach the nationto read, İnönü, the prime minister of the era, said that “the whole nation is a class-room today”. Atatürk was positioned discursively as the chief instructor. This rolewas perpetuated through the use of a photographic image of him in front of a black-board holding a piece of chalk and teaching the new alphabet.

In the mahalle mektebi, the students were also expected to memorise the funda-mentals of Islam and some Koranic verses, and learn how to perform prayers. Asmentioned in the memoirs describing a typical mektep day, the hoca (teacher) usedto read these verses line by line, and the pupils were asked to recite and memorisethem without any cognition of the meaning. Forming a circle on the ground sur-rounding the hoca and squatting on their knees, they were supposed to repeat thesounds of Arabic syllables in a monotonous chant, keeping time with their bodies,which they swung slowly backward and forward. Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar noted:

never pause mumbling or swinging. Otherwise, the hoca beats your head with a three-meter long stick… By way of return of the beating, what we learn is Arabic expres-sions that we simply repeat like a parrot but do not know the meaning of any of theirwords.46

This memorisation or parroting was, Hasan Âli Yücel wrote, designed “tooppress our intelligence and darken our consciousness at our young age.”47 In hiswell-known novel, first published in 1922, Reşat Nuri Güntekin talked about the rec-

42Hasan Âli Yücel, quoted in Onur, Türkiye’de çocukluğun tarihi, 342.43Ibid.44Benjamin C. Fortna, “Learning to Read in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early TurkishRepublic.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East XXI, nos. 1&2(2001): 33–41.45As quoted in Gezer, Mustafa Kemal ulusal eğitim: Köy Enstitüleri, 83.46As quoted in Onur, Türkiye’de çocukluğun tarihi, 387.47As quoted in Gezer, Mustafa Kemal ulusal eğitim: Köy Enstitüleri, 83.

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itation of dread-filled prayers in the mektep, such as “the fleeting world moves on: itwaits for none. Roll on, O world! Your course will soon be run”.48 The hoca was,as mentioned in the novel, seeking to “extinguish in the heart all worldly desires”through recitation of dread-filled prayers and by using every opportunity to bring“the little kids face to face with death” and “describe the terror of death”.49 Moderneducation, however, was to be qualitatively different. The objective of the schoolwas to create “good citizenry”. Eliminating the hold of the religious canon andsuperstition was defined as the foremost aim of the republican school.

Another celebrated icon, and the epitome of the pedagogical progress and moder-nity, was the new teacher. The hoca of the mahalle mektebi was delegated to serveas the new teacher’s “other” in every aspect. Ömer Seyfettin described his hoca as

… a hunchbacked, tall, old, and weak-minded woman who had barely hair on herhead. Her blue eyes used to blaze with rage. With her huge, yellow, and beak-likenose, she used to resemble a molted, malicious, and sick hawk.50

The hoca of İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu was “a man with a turban. This man wastruly a bigot. He used to get pleasure from beating children [with] a bastinado”.51

Like many others, Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar mentioned the use of violent corporalpunishment by the hoca:

I started going to the mektep in Grit (Crete). In my sixth year, I came to İstanbul andstarted Yakup Ağa Mektep. The Yakup Ağa Mektep was not a school; but it was aprison for the children of the time with its bastinado and a variety of sticks, rods, andpoles. Even after I got older, I could not have helped but used to shudder when Ipassed by its door.52

In contrast to the image of the hoca as an evil old man (or woman) sitting on thefloor in a dark and terrifying room “equipped with torture devices”, the new teacherwas portrayed as a clean, smiling, caring young man (or woman) dressed in Euro-pean style, standing with dignity in a light, clean, authoritative and orderly class-room.53 In the modern school, children were watched and controlled more subtlyand more efficiently through the rows of desks, bells, routines and timetables, whichwere proudly featured as a celebrated quality through their contrast to the chaoticand violent educational environment of the mektep.54

It should be noted that the mahalle mektebi discredited and othered by the repub-lican elite also became an object of celebration and appropriation as a national trea-sure in the later years. Arguing against the abandonment of the Ottoman past in theconstruction of national history and seeking to incorporate the Ottoman and Islamicheritage into the larger history of the nation, this perspective insisted on the mahallemektebi as a manifestation of Turkish character in education. This does not meanthat the supporters of this perspective were against the universal and rationalist

48Reşat Nuri Güntekin, Çalıkuşu (İstanbul: Semih Lütfi Kitapevi, 1922, 1945), 159.49Ibid.50As quoted in Onur, Türkiye’de çocukluğun tarihi, 357.51Ibid.52Ibid., 386.53See, for instance, Güntekin, Çalıkuşu.54Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan(New York: Vintage Books, 1977).

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principles of schooling and favoured a return to a form of some preexisting, pureand primordial way of education; rather, they aimed to demonstrate the compatibilitybetween the mahalle mektebi and the rationalist and universal principles of the mod-ern school. For example, it was argued that the continuous circle of the mektep(instead of having academic levels) was a marker of an individualised education pro-gram. For some, the mahalle mektebi were the schools for which the communityclaimed ownership and in which the community actively participated.55

Conclusion

In this article, my concern was with the cultural construction of the school in Turkeyin relation to the construction of Turkish nation-ness. By situating the school withinan interrelated network of discourses available in early twentieth-century Turkey, Ilooked at how the school consolidated itself into an object of thought in support ofnarrating and imagining Turkish nation-ness and how this became intelligible. Thediscourses in this network included modernity, nation, peasantry, history, culture, thewest and the Ottoman past.

In the early republican period, one of the central problems of the ruling elite,educated in the most westernised schools of the Ottoman Empire and acting as aninterface between the western world and the Anatolian masses, was how to providea total break from the past, even if only mythical. In order to deal with the harshcriticisms of western European observers about Turks as the significant other ofEuropean identity, Turkish intellectuals and statesmen had to assume a satisfactoryposition against what was conceived of as “the west”. Assaulted by the critiques ofwestern observers, Turkish intellectuals and statesmen had to write a history, andthis imagination of history should be one that could reject all criticism. The schoolfound its intelligibility in this problem and consolidated itself to imagine a historythat negated the Ottoman past and marked a new era. Juxtaposed with a radicallycontrasting image of the mahalle mektebi of the Ottoman era, the modern schoolbrought into the present the Ottoman past as the root cause of the predicament inwhich the nation found itself in the early twentieth century, but definitely not thenation itself. Positioned in a binary relationship with the modern school, the mahallemektebi were constructed as the “other” of the modern school and, therefore, of thenational “self”. In this binary relationship, the mahalle mektebi was everything themodern school was not: irrational, backward, oppressive, non-scientific and, there-fore, not “us”. The portrayal of the school as a sign of modernity, progress andnational character allowed the Republican ruling elite to construct themselves as au-thorised to “tell the truth” and act as agents of change and reform in order to restruc-ture society. This representation of the school as a symbol expressing the self-imageand aspirations of the republic also provided the republican elite a precise map forthe restructuring of society.

55See Ali Birinci and İsmail Kara, Bir eğitim tasavvuru olarak Mahalle-Sıbyan Mektepleri:Hatıralar - yorumlar – tetkikler, 2005.

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This article’s contribution to historical studies of nation-making and education istwofold. In line with recent research in the historical study of schooling,56 thisarticle first approaches the school not as an external mechanism operating towardscertain ends but as a discourse that has its own effects to structure social life. Byexamining the school as a discourse inscribing in itself certain cultural theses abouthuman existence and producing certain shared concerns, sensibilities and desires,this study sheds light on the pedagogical function of the school that goes beyondthe boundaries of the classroom. Second, this study destabilises the fixity and essen-tiality of the school in historicist accounts of schooling. By drawing attention tohow the school was reconstructed in early twentieth-century Turkey as a part of thenationalising and modernising project, this article emphasises the open-ended natureof the school that accommodates the different discourses, concerns, perceivedchallenges and power relations available in the historically and culturally specificcontexts in which the school unfolds. This study illustrates further that in order tounderstand how the school became a prominent feature of the world for which itplays a constitutive role, it has to be situated among and studied within a series ofother discourses that vary across time and space.

Notes on contributorSabiha Bilgi is an assistant professor in the Department of Elementary Education, Abant IzzetBaysal University, Turkey. Her research interest lies in the historical and cultural studies ofeducation and childhood. She received her PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison,USA.

56See, for instance, Thomas S. Popkewitz, Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform:Science, Education, and Making Society by Making the Child (New York: Routledge, 2008),Elsie Rockwell, “Popular Education and the Logics of Schooling,” Paedagogica Historica 47(2011): 33–48, Noah W. Sobe, “Cultivating a ‘Slavic Modern’: Yugoslav Beekeeping,Schooling and Travel in the 1920s and 1930s,” Paedagogica Historica 41, nos. 1–2 (2005):143–58, and various chapters in Materialities of Schooling: Design, Technology, Objects,Routines, eds. Martin Lawn and Ian Grosvenor (Oxford: Symposium Books, 2005).

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