Educational philosophy of Mehmet Aki̇f Ersoy (A qualitative analysis on the context of his speeches and writings)

The aim of this research is to find the educational philosophy of Mehmet Akif Ersoy who is an important person of Turkish history and literature to make an understanding of the philosophy of education process and to contribute to scientification through his speeches and writings. In this study, grounded theory method of the qualitative analyse was used. In this process, Mehmet Akif Ersoy's speeches and writings were checked in the perspective of the dimensions of an educational philosophy. After finding the documents, it was built a system (system-form-theory-opinion) which contains Mehmet Akif Ersoy's speeches and writings. The research sample was built by the documents consisting of the Akif's speech and writings (books, commentary, advice and sermon, writing in magazines and newspapers, letters) which can find an answer that can meet all or any dimension of the problem of "What is the educational philosophy of Mehmet Akif Ersoy by the documents of his speeches and writings?"; the sampling was built by grounded theory model which is used in researches made with theory-building strategy and requires continuation of data collection until the concepts and the processes which can be the answer to the research question start to repeat. The analysis of documentation was used in getting the documents. The data in research were taken by the 7 facilities which contain the main detection tools and a summary of "The Tools of Detecting Educational Philosophy" tables that developed by Toprakçı, Buldur, Bozpolat, Dağdeviren ve Eren (2013) Mehmet Akif Ersoy's educational philosophy was searched by the way of "The Tools of Detecting Educational Philosophy". First, the six problems ("Why we teach?", "What we teach?", "How we teach?", "Where we teach?", "When and how much we teach?", "To whom and with whom we teach?") were checked in the document. After finding the answers, they were put under the questions. First, the frequent words were found under a unique question. Then, for answering the question, the expressions which were put under the philosophical questions checked in the light of educational philosophies and were put under the philosophy which they belong. By that, it was put forward in the light of the educational philosophic questions for finding what Mehmet Akif Ersoy's educational thinking perspective was. After that, for every single educational philosophy, the answers to the questions were analysed, digitized and found how much answers were given. By collecting, Mehmet Akif Ersoy's weighted educational philosophy was found. For building validity and reliability, the data collected by an objective manner and confirmed by the consultant, credibility was constructed by that. In every step of the research, the consultant confronted the results with each others and interpreted by using the collecting data mechanism of depth of focus. Also, except for works that reached by researchers, it was asked for the opinions of Prof. Dr. Fazıl Gökçek who has studied on Mehmet Akif Ersoy to find out whether there is any other works of Mehmet Akif Ersoy and confirm of the accuracy of findings obtained during data collection. Here are the conclusions of the study: In the documents of Mehmet Akif Ersoy's speeches and writings, in the perspective of the educational philosophy, mostly used vocabularies are "human/humanity" and "science. When the structure of an educational philosophy is thought about in its entirety, Mehmet Akif Ersoy's educational philosophy is "Essentialism". The dimensions (components) of this structure are "Perennialism" in terms of the objective of education; "Essentialism" in terms of content, in terms of method, in terms of the place of education; in terms of the amount and time of education and people related with the education. Looking through the conclusions of this study, it could be suggested that the practitioners and theoreticians it provided the recognition and understanding of educators direction outside of Mehmet Akif Ersoy poet direction in the Turkish education system.