The relationship between education and politics in religious textbooks used in primary schools between the years 1923-1933 (the case of Cumhuriyet çocuğunun din dersleri 3-4-5)

Education has been used as a functional tool by political authorities due to the power of organizing, editing and controlling the social space. Being aware of the power of education in this field, the founding staff of the Republic gave great importance to education. To legitimize the Republican regime and the established changes in life, to ensure continuity and to cultivate the ideal citizens of the Republic of Turkey, they have established education in line with their ideologies. For this purpose, they made important arrangements in the field of curriculum programs and textbooks in the early years of the Republic. They have shaped curriculum programs and textbooks in line with Republican philosopy of education. It is possible to observe the traces of the ideological structure of political power in curriculum programs and textbooks prepared during this period. Religious lessons are one of the courses where the ideological interventions of political power can be seen clearly. In the first years of the Republic, religious lessons were instrumentalized in order to adopt the religious understanding of the founding staff of the Republic, to eliminate the religious opposition to the revolutions and to make the total change possible. In this period, there is a great similarity between the discourses in the religious textbooks taught in primary schools and the actions and discourses of the founders of the Republic. The subject of this study is the relationship between education and politics in the first years of the Republic. The reflections of the official ideology of the Republic on education are examined through the case of Muallim Abdülbaki's primary school religious textbooks. In the study that was carried out by qualitative research method, textual discourse analysis technique was used. The scope of this study was limited to the period between 1923 and 1933; the primary schools as the education level; the religious courses as a lesson and the textbooks of Muallim Abdulbaki's Cumhuriyet Çocuğunun Din Dersleri as a textbook.