A General Overview of The Turkish Education System
By Fatma Ozkanlar, March 3rd 2025
The state wants the generation to grow up as individuals who live and produce in accordance with the rules, while the society wants the individual to grow up in accordance with its own values. This situation brings with it the need for education. In the periods when the concept of the Republic began to be formed and adopted, education was shaped with the aim of raising citizens who would help build the new Republic of Turkey, primarily by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In other words, education in our country aims to make the individual exist as a good citizen within society. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk emphasized that the state could not exist only with armed war, and that education should also be on the state's agenda for development. During Mustafa Kemal's period, it was a remarkable step to have Grigoriy Petrov's novel In the Land of White Lilies translated and delivered to teachers free of charge in 1928 for the professional development of teachers.
Again, İsmet İnönü states his approach to education with the following statements: "We want a national education policy. What this means, we understand it better with its opposite meaning. When they ask what is against national education, we say that this is neither a religious education nor an international education. The education we will provide is not religious or it will not be international, but it will be national. Our education will be ours and it will be for us. We can think of national education in two ways: Political and national. As we wish, this nation did not draw a single and only picture of a nation. If this generation works seriously with consciousness and under the guidance of science, the Turkish nation can be a complete and perfect nation in cultural, social and ideological aspects..." These statements of İsmet İnönü summarized the aims of education policies in the early days of the Republic very clearly. (The text discussed above was largely supported by the book titled "National Journal File Subject: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk" by Ötüken Publications.)
