Today in History – 17 April

The Law on Village Institutes is issued

In the early 1940s, nearly ninety percent of Turkey’s population was still living in villages; only seventeen thousand teachers were available to teach at the villages, which, by then had reached fifty thousand in number. This discrepancy had created a massive black hole in the field of education.

Founded on April 17, 1940 in order to compensate for this shortage and to train teachers for primary schools, the Village Institutes foresaw the education of intelligent, primary school graduate village children, who would return to their villages to teach upon graduation. The teachers would both offer formal training to students and show them modern methods of agriculture.

Established under the auspices of Prime Minister İsmet with the extraordinary efforts of Minister of National Education Hasan Âli Yücel and İsmail Hakkı Tonguç, Village Institutes soon began to yield brilliant results. In a speech he delivered in Samsun on May 2, 1942, İnönü expressed his support for the initiative with the following remarks: “We have invested great hopes in this organization. A constructive, resourceful, and hard working spirit dominates life at the institutes… It is the sacred mission of these institutes to educate powerful, altruistic, and patriotic village teachers.”

The Village Institutes; however, were worn out over time by their own mistakes and external pressures. Certain rumors even surfaced that they were cradles of Communist ideology, as students wore uniforms and participated in school administration. The Village Institutes were finally closed down in 1954. Until then, a total of 17,251 village teachers -1,308 women and 15,943 men- had been trained in these schools.

In 1966, İsmet İnönü would say that his greatest legacy was the Village Institutes and the transition in a multi-party system in politics.