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Ottoman Modernization and EducationPage 1 of 2
The political developments in the late Ottoman Empire, as it is the case in any modernizing society, were very much related to the developments in Ottoman-Turkish education. The nineteenth century, known as the longest century of the Ottoman Empire, was a period of reform, modernization and centralization; and education, though relatively late, was also touched by these reform initiatives. The modernization process in Turkey included state centralization and the weakening of the traditional sources of authority. In this process the authority of the state spread from center to periphery. Education was one of the field by which the central state began to penetrate and shape the periphery. While in the classical period expenditures of education were not met by the government, starting from the mid-nineteenth century public education became one of the main tasks of central administration (Alkan, 2008, 11). The first civil and secular government schools were opened with the purpose of bringing up a body of civil servants required for the newly growing bureaucracy. In this regard it would not be wrong to say that the modernization of Ottoman bureaucracy is closely intertwined with history of education in Turkey. The developments and reforms in the field of education during the late Ottoman period were important in the sense that the legacy of educational uniformity and centralism was subsequently adopted by the Turkish Republic. While the first serious attempts for modernization were laid down in the imperial Edict of Gülhane in 1839, the field of education had been hardly touched in this document. During the whole Tanzimat period (1839-1876) we see an increasing emphasis on Ottomanism. Due to the nationalist uprising in the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the ruling elite launched a policy of Ottomanism for preventing separatist nationalist movements. The policy of Ottomanism, which became the official ideology of the Ottoman state during the Tanzimat period, aimed to embrace all of the Ottoman subjects regardless of their ethnicity, religion and language. This policy had very significant role in terms of the transformation of Ottoman “subjects” into “citizens”. The Ottoman case in this sense bears significant resemblance with the contemporary states (Fortna, 2005, 67-73). As the result of this, the Ottoman government made the legal arrangements and promulgated the law for citizenship in 1869. The idea was to create an “Ottoman nation” and “good citizens” and, as will be seen in the following parts, these developments had significant reflections on the textbooks in the schools. As will be detailed below, the second half of the 19th century witnessed significant reforms in the field of education. It is an undeniable fact that the founding cadre of the Republican Period was educated in these modern and secular schools. The reign of Abdülhamid II (1876-1909), was a period in which education began to spread from imperial center to the provincial periphery. In terms of the number of schools opened, this period represents the peak point of the 19th century Ottoman history of education. In addition to the proliferation of the secondary schools, Abdülhamid II opened many Occupational High Schools as well. |
