The problem of education in Tanzimat era novel

The political and social changes that took place in the world since the 19th century cause the westernization movements to begin in the Ottoman Empire. The Western influence, which was clarified in 1839 by the Tanzimat declaration, is seen in many areas, including social, cultural, political and economic. A social and cultural impact of this movement of change is highly important in terms of preparing the society for a new order. The intellectuals and artists, who are aware of this, believe that it is necessary to tell westernization and a new understanding of society to the public. Education is the primary of the topics on which the authors of the Tanzimat, who are united in this belief, lay emphasis. The authors in Tanzimat era, who aims to make the public conscious of the importance of education, criticize the educational attitudes of the era in articles and in newspapers, and they also criticise these attitudes in novels, a new literary genre. With modernization, they place education on the basis of the healthy development of a society and interpret this in different perspectives in the novels of the era. The idea that westernization is only possible with systematic and high quality understanding of education is a topic that is overemphasized in novels. In addition, how the education system should be changed is one of the subjects discussed about the educational problem. For this reason, the writers of the Tanzimat era mention the education and the educational problem in several ways, from the understanding of education to the transfer of education in the institutional dimension; child education to parent education; art education to mother tongue/foreign language education; the religious education to the foreign education. The fact that the artists move this awareness through the novels into the literary realm, at the same time, signalize their leading role that they also undertake in modernization. In this study, the role of education in the westernization process, how the understanding of education is, the educational problems and the approach of the Tanzimat period authors to these problems are evaluated with with reference to the novels of the era.