The fundamentals of citizenship education in the early Republic of Turkey (1923-1938)

With the establishment of the new country, changes were made in the curriculum in terms of knowledge, skills and value that Republic citizen must possess. The changes of Early Republic of Turkey, state's ideology and its aim of raising ideal individual reflected on the textbooks and in this respect the textbooks were rearranged. Additionally, love of the country and consciousness of being a nation were included in the textbooks regarding the desired goals to be achieved. Citizenship education in schools played a major role in raising desired type of individuals of the Republic. Adopting the republican regime was the basic philosophy of the state for the generations to be educated in the Early Republic Period. Atatürk was personally very interested in history researches and he led to the studies to build our national history. In this period, theses were put forwarded to respond the unfounded allegations about Turks.In this study, it is presented that on which fundamentals the citizen education based on and practices to raise new generations having national feelings in accordance with Turkish History Thesis (Türk Tarih Tezi) and Sun Language Theory (Güneş Dil Teorisi) in the Early Republic period Construction of the national identity regarding Kemalist thought was implemented on the fields of history, language, geography, physical education, sport, archeology, anthropology and civics. The reflections of these fields of study and their contributions to citizen education were discussed. Especially 'The Speech' (Nutuk) the great work written by Atatürk and 'Civic knowledge for the citizens' (Vatandaş İçin Medeni Bilgiler) written by Afet İnan by Atatürk's orders were main resources used in this study. In this study, document review and literature review which is one of the qualitative research methods, was used. It is also benefited from the provided textbooks of the Early Republic period, books about this period, journals ,articles and theses.