Atatürk's educational personality

National education has been the most emphasized and stressed reform among the great reforms made and gifted to Turkish Nation by Great Leader Atatürk. In the Turkish Grand National Assembly Government, which was founded on 23 April 1920 in the early period of the Turkish War of Independence, Atatürk, who is also the first chairman of the Assembly Government, named only two ministries with the word "nation": Ministries of National Education and National Defence.In the first glorious days of the triumph after the Turkish War of Independence, Turkish and foreign journalists asked a question to Atatürk: ?You saved the country! What would you do now?? Atatürk's reply was: ?My greatest ambition is to be the Minister of National Education and work for advancing the level of national enlightenment.? Great Leader Atatürk, by repeating his idea in so many other occasions, also stated that: ?If I had not been the President, I would be the Minister of National Education of Turkish Republic.?Atatürk's educational reforms were not an outcome of a sudden decision. Atatürk analyzed the reasons of the disasters which took the nation to the edge and relations between those disasters and education by looking them from a visionary perspective. Therefore, education had been the core of his efforts since he arrived at Samsun. From the beginning of the Turkish War of Independence to the death of the Great Leader, neither a military operation nor a political or military crisis could have hindered the efforts to increase the educational level of the nation and achieve the modern way of civilization.Atatürk considered national education in Turkish Republic from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. By taking advantage of various opinions which were adaptable to the social structure of Turkish nation and under the awareness and responsibility of working hard in a short time, he preferred to obtain a synthesis that would resolve the educational problems of Turkey.