About 15 years passed after the
Independence War and another world war was about to break out. Turkland was in
poverty. There was not plenty food for people but there were rapid developments
in every field, one of which is education. As you can understand from the title,
I am going to tell you about village institutes which were far beyond the time
they served. Through the end of 40’s, ıt was recognized that there was a
really big gap between cities and villages and in order to close the gap,
something had to be done. For this aim, with a law, they made it possible for
people who had done their military service as a sergeant to be teachers after a
six month of education. These people were to teach villagers reading, writing
and modern agriculture technics. Some years after this try, they recognized
that it was not possible to continue villagers’ education with these teachers
and they started to think about more radical solutions. Hasan Ali Yucel, who
was minister of education that time and knew about Ismail Hakkı Tonguç’s ideas
about education, made him inspector of ministry of education. This opened the
way to village intuitions. These two brilliant educators made it possible for
village intuitions to be opened with the law of 1940. With the law, 4 teacher
training schools, which were opened earlier, were turned into village institutions.
17 other institution started to be built up with the law. The aim was to
educate primary school graduate student to be teachers and they were going to
serve compulsorily 20 years in their villages with a salary of 20 liras. These
schools had field to make agriculture, cattle to rise and workshops to do
carpentry and blacksmithing. Students did not only learn from books but also
they learned from applied education. Besides this education of craft, each
student had to play an instrument and read 20 of books from world literature
which Hasan Ali Yucel made translated. There was also an advanced conception of
democracy in these schools. Every Saturday, everybody in school, including headmaster
and caretakers, gathered in yard and criticized the previous week. Students
could criticize even the headmaster, which was an indicator of advanced democracy
which does not exist today. As these unique schools had democracy and graduates
of them taught villagers, some people like landowners and conservatives got
disturbed and started to denigrate the schools saying there were undesirable
acts between girls and boys and saying the schools spread communism. Through
the end of CHP power, there had to be made some unwanted changes in these
schools and after DP came to power, it turned these schools into regular
teacher training schools. All the educators are agreed that world lost too much
with the closing of village institutions, about which Milli Sef Ismet Inonu
said: I have two big works: village institutions and multy party-regime. Most
probably, Turkland would be a better country in all aspects if these schools
were not closed. 
