Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE VILLAGE AND THE WORLD
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Page 275
Arabic and sometimes he taught them to read the Arabic script, so that they could read old Turkish, and read out without understanding the Arabic version of the Koran, pronounced according tolocal convention. In the past therefore, probably a few men in each village were literate. In Sakaltutan, in 1950, eight of the older men could read the old script.
The Republican government had very different ideas about village education. It set out to provide a state-imposed system of schools teaching modern subjects in the new infidel script. Up to 1949 religious teaching was specifically forbidden, and since then it has been a reformed and modern version of Islam which has been found in the official textbooks of religious knowledge (Lewis (1961) pi 412).
Teachers of the new sort were necessarily urban-educated, and mostly young. They were also few in number - 28,000 for the whole of Turkey in 1940, of whom 21,000 were primary school teachers (Ann. Stat. (1951), Tables 117, 119). Those who were available were mostly unwilling, indeed unable, to live in villages because of the vast cultural differences between town and village.
The government made two experiments to meet these difficulties. As a temporary expedient, suitable men doing their military service were picked out, given short courses, and sent back to their villages to teach. They took the village children in single three-year batches of mixed age, mainly in reading and writing. For these men this occupation was mostly a winter sideline to the main business of working their land. Ahmet (K) (p. 24) was doing this job in Sakaltutan in 1949-50.
The second experiment was on a much grander and more permanent scale. Between 1939 and 1946 twenty-one special boarding schools for village children were bullt, known as Village Institutes. All except one were outside towns and away from urban influences. Much of the construction work was done by pupils and teachers, some by more or less voluntary village labour. The programme aimed to give the boys practical as well as academic training and to send them back to the villages as leaders and reformers. The early Institutes worked at their task with enthusiasm and idealism. The boys who entered had to have completed five years of elementary school and were given a further five years, bringing them to at least seventeen
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