Teaching “Principles of Ataturk and History of Revolution” Class at the Universities

Abstract

History is a discipline, which enables to make healthy predictions related to the future and to produce correct policies within the process of the time, by means of questioning the past. Every society examines the facts and events within its own knowledge, skills, conditions, and capabilities as well as tries to give direction to the future by taking lesson from all those experiences. From this point of view, ‘History of Revolution’ class is far from being just a static history class confining itself to narration of the past. At the same time, it is a dynamic, sociality-increasing culture class, lighting the things that happened in near history by evaluating them within the known special conditions of the country and thus showing how to use that knowledge for correct decision-making process for the future. Hence, this study deals with teaching ‘Principles of Ataturk and History of Revolution’ class at the universities with an effort to find answers to the questions of ‘when this class was started to be thought at the universities? and ‘what kind of a progress did it show within the time? Firstly, the reasons for the emergence of such a class and the opinions related to the History of Revolution at one-party period was explained and then the studies regarding the formation of History of Revolution programs within the periphery of Turkish-Islamic synthesis were presented, by using descriptive scanning method.