Ordered liberty and disciplined freedom: Turkish education and republican democracy, 1923-50.

For students of the twentieth-century Middle East, the problematic prospects of democracy attract great interest. Nation states in this region are politically young in comparison to those of western Europe. After emerging from colonial rule, they have undergone uneven socio-economic development where socio-political processes are telescoped and regimes confront tremendous challenges to survival. Observers have thus pondered whether or not Middle Eastern states can be democratic in a manner understood in the West, where the concept of democracy itself is held to have originated. For those considering democracy alien to Arab-Islamic political culture, Egypt's 'liberal experiment' in parliamentary democracy during 1923-52 presents a clear example of failure, where leaders, parties, monarchs, and foreign powers conspired to vitiate democratic life and discredit it in the eyes of citizens. Likewise, French conduct in inter-war Syria undercut the development of democratic norms, and reinforced the oligarchical political inclinations of the late Ottoman era elite families. Conversely, though identified closely in the West with democracy, Israel has been characterized as manifesting a procedural as opposed to conceptual commitment to democracy, along with elements of ethnic democracy. (1)

Turkey presents something of a contrast to its fellow Ottoman successor states. A movement in the early twentieth century inspired by the French Revolution (the 'Young Turk' Revolution, 1908-9) introduced urban populations in Anatolia to citizenship as a right entitling everyone to political participation and social equality. In more concrete terms, popular mobilization and participation in politics through elections and parliaments has been a hallmark and source of pride in Turkey since the late 1920s, while multi-party competition and real voter choice has been the norm for most of Turkey's post-1946 life. All the same, two regime-supported ventures into multi-party politics in the 1920s and 1930s were aborted when rather tame opposition parties proved too popular for the leaders of the ruling Republican Peoples' Party (RPP). Later, the beginnings of contested elections in the mid-1940s went forward haltingly, when functionaries in the RPP remained reluctant to distinguish between the party and the organs of the state. More worrisome, Turkey's self-proclaimed guardians of secular republicanism--the military--overtly suspended parliamentary politics three times between 1960 and 1983, contenting themselves with a 'postmodern' coup in 1997 to unseat the elected albeit Islamist government. (2) Thus one could assert that democracy, as broadly understood in political and societal terms, is not valued in Turkey to the degree that it is in the West.

As against this contention one may note that the very notion of democracy itself is a contingent one, the manifestations of which vary according to historical experiences. Among the 'liberal' countries of the West for example, Anglo-European parliamentarism and proportional representation differ in procedure and ethos from the American federal system, which values individual states' rights and a direct legislator-constituent responsibility. Thus, beyond a certain cluster of variously interpreted ideas, there appears to be no essentialized, monolithic form of democracy by which to mechanically measure different countries. As for Turkey, just as it has sought to affiliate politically and culturally with the democratic countries of the European Union and NATO, Turks have been exposed to certain practices, attitudes, and structures associated with democracy for almost a century. Therefore, rather than focusing on the recurrent disruptions of Turkish political life in order to label the young republic non-democratic in some normative sense, a more fruitful method of inquiry needs to examine the way democracy was understood and communicated during the first generation of modern Turkish statehood, in a fashion which takes into account surrounding political processes. Here, education--as both evolving pedagogic discourse and curriculum--affords us one of the best means by which to understand what official and semiofficial Turkey perceived democracy to be, and in what terms they presented it to the first cohorts of republican citizens passing through a central organ of mass socialization.

Inquiry through education is ideally suited to this task for several reasons. On the level of evolving discourse, both pedagogical elites and practitioners in the educational trenches acted as 'nationalist educator intellectuals' intimately involved in crafting the complexion and convictions of a new Turkey, in the middle of Miroslav Hroch's 'Phase C' of nationalism when mass mobilization becomes the mission of both educators and the newly educated. (3) Turkish pedagogues at all levels thus espoused a close conceptual and operational link between the educational and the political. Equally important, along with a few key luminaries, many writing about education and democracy were engaged intellectuals whose socio-political thought evolved through interaction with educational work. These included Ministry of Education officials, teachers, administrators, and graduates of state schools. Looking at their views allows us to grasp programmatic conceptions of democracy held by that middle level of people working on a daily basis through education to form new Turks. (4)

Moving beyond discourse, examination of curriculum in a country where syllabi and texts adhered closely to official guidelines permits us to understand the substance of what Turkish youth encountered in schools. Here, consideration of materials introduced in successive grade levels shows us what the broad grouping of government, mid-level officials, and curriculum writers desired emerging citizens to absorb during school-based formation from the 1920s to 1950. Further, not only did pedagogical conceptions of democracy reflect understanding of the phenomenon's development in the West, but curricular presentations of democratic conduct from the post-First World War years until the onset of the Cold War evolved in close relation with domestic and foreign political processes. Addressing democracy in Turkish education thus allows us better insight into the global cultural affiliations engaged educational thinkers desired for Turkey, just as it illuminates the foreign and domestic political impact on socio-political priorities in a key arena for legitimizing regime views. More broadly, looking at the educational process in Turkey during these years renders more concrete the convictions borne by citizens from the 1930s into the multiparty years of the 1950s and 1960s regarding the nature and functioning of democracy, just as we gain greater understanding of the reasons for Turkey's problematic yet continuing commitment to this form of politics.

In the following pages we begin by examining the definition and characteristics of democracy as conceived through the late 1930s by Turkish educators of various levels, in the context of their formulating a vision of modern Turkey. Second, as Turkish--and indeed, global--educational thought viewed schools as miniature societies, to use the term of John Dewey who visited Turkey in 1924, we analyse Turkish educators' recommendations regarding school dynamics, as a prescription for the workings of the democratic and republican socio-political order meant to radiate out from the schools. Third, we enter the curricular arena to see how civics and sociology classes on the levels of primary (ilk), middle (orta), and secondary (lise) schooling conveyed notions of political conduct conceived as reflecting democracy. Fourth and finally, we will track changes in both discourse and curriculum in Turkey at the end of the 1940s, as global and domestic conditions changed.

In articulating particular understandings of democracy, Turkish pedagogues conveyed a blueprint for the new society they felt empowered to create. At the same time, they cultivated relationships among the basic conceptual referents of Kemalism. These included nationalism, freedom, duty, equality, society-orientedness, rationality, and laicism. These concepts were ubiquitously associated both with each other and Kemalist Turkey in a quasi-scientific fashion. As a result, a perhaps conscious effort to define democracy in a fashion proving the new Republic's democratic nature animated pedagogical discussion of this topic. As the emerging nationalist narrative asserted that the Republican elite had rescued Turkey from non-democratic sultanic despotism, sincere conviction rather than semantic manipulation led Turkish educational thinkers to associate democracy with the kind of socio-political order to which Ataturk and RPP leaders aspired. Kemalist republicanism could thus be vindicated as democratic while democracy could emerge as a republican trait, in a sort of Kemalist integrisme. Illustrating this method of discourse quite well is a series of articles written by Ismail Hakki Baltacioglu throughout the 1920s. Referred to as the 'father' of republican Turkish educational thought and practice, by the 1920s he had already had a career as a teacher, had visited foreign countries' educational institutions, and was a prominent participant in the young republic's official educational debates of the late 1920s and 1930s, as an administrator and academician. Though removed from his position during the transformation of the Darulfunun into Istanbul University in 1933-4, he continued working as a publicist, scholar, and parliamentarian well into the 1950s, permitting him to influence rising generations of Turkish educators. (5)