Türkiye Cumhuriyeti'nin 100. Yılında Bir Öğretmen Yetiştirme Modeli Olarak Köy Enstitülerinin Modernleşmeye İlişkin Özellikleri

Abstract

The village institutes project is an educational initiative that emerged as a rural development project in the history of the Republic. When we look at the education programmes implemented, it is seen that although the aim was to train teachers for the villages, artistic and cultural education constituted an important part of the programme. From this point of view, it can be said that the village institutes aimed to transform villages into places where modern individuals who follow the Republican revolutions live and have urban characteristics. The acceleration of migration from villages to cities and the increase in internal migration with industrialisation coincide with the period of the closure of the village institutes. Although various educational and sociological studies have been conducted on the founding and early periods of the Republic, research on the modern human type that the village institutes wanted to raise is limited in the literature. The aim of this study is to evaluate the educational programme and practices in the village institutes in the context of creating modern human beings and to examine the experiences of the students in their villages in the example of Çifteler Village Institute. The article is designed as a document-based research. The steps of the document analysis method were analysed. The studies obtained as a result of the search among postgraduate theses and academic articles on village institutes were subjected to content analysis. In addition, the letters written by the teachers graduated from Çifteler Village Institute to the school administration were also analysed in the context of the desired human type. It was observed that the education given in the village institutes had many artistic and cultural practices aiming to teach village life as well as urban consciousness, and that the education given included elements that would contribute positively to the awareness of living together. In the letters written by the graduates to the directorate of Çifteler Village Institute, it was concluded that they could not be happy in the village where they were working and that they could not reach the environments where they could exhibit the new behaviours they had acquired at school.