| Republican Turkish modernization has been initiated and shaped by a reforming elite comprised of the military, bureaucracy and the intellectuals and aimed at a top-down, controlled and hegemonic transformation of state and society through a series of sweeping reforms, which had a solid background in the nineteenth century Ottoman reform movement and ideological formations. This modernization project had two fundamental and linked components, namely westernization and nationalization. The official perspective of the Republic centered on these ideals was termed Kemalism in the 1930s and provided the ideological substructure to the process. The political hub of Kemalism was the Republican People's Party, which functioned as the organizational and ideological motor of the modernization project and the dissemination of the Republican ideals to the masses. Education in general, public schooling in particular, have been one of the principal tools in the propagation of the official perspective and were used as transformative forces in the elite's efforts of engendering an identity change by means of a nation-building process as an integral part of the modernization project. The fundamentals of the desired identity transformation rested on the transference of pre-existing loyalties among the population into an allegiance to the Republican state, its ideals and Turkishness. The association with the Turkish state and Turkish nationality was expected to surpass all other possible identities.;One of the markers of the new Turkish identity as envisioned by the ruling elite depended on a dissociation from and de-legitimization of the preceding historical periods. The Ottoman heritage was rejected as a deteriorated edifice and Islam was declared as an obstructing force to progress. Hence, beginning with the 1930s, the Turkish Republic presented its citizens with a highly selective version of history as the means for this dissociation and it is primarily through the writing of new history textbooks that the new regime directly mirrored its ideologically motivated assertions in educational content. Especially with regard to identity creation, this depiction of history determined the ideological pillars of Turkish education pertaining to content during the 1930s and for years to come. |
