Teaching Turkish Republic revulotion history and Kemalism in primary education in Turkey (1981-2018)

This research examines Turkish Republic Revulotion History and Kemalism course that has been lectured since 1981 in the secondary level (secondary school) of the basic education. The aim of the research is to represent the objectives, content, weekly hours, date range that the course has been offered and general approach of the curricula related to the course. Besides, examining the content and physical changes that took place in the coursebooks that were developed on aforementioned curricula is also among the aims of the research. The research employs document analysis that is a qualitative research method to examine the curricula provided by National Ministry of Education and coursebooks that were developed on those curricula. The data analysis includes descriptive and content analysis. The research results show that there were changes in the curricula of the course twelve times between 1981 and 2018. While the objectives and content of the course reached the maximum in 1998, they gradually became narrow starting from 2005. The weekly number of hours for the course were three in 2009 and 2010 while it was two in the other eras. While the number of aims was 49 and attainments was 216 in 1998, the number of attainments decreased since 2005. It is notable that the subject and attainments of Kemalism decreased. The coursebooks prepared by National Ministry of Education were used until 1998 and since then other coursebooks prepared by private publishing companies were also used. In the research, sixteen different coursebooks were examined in terms of content and physical aspects. While the coursebooks that were published between 1981 and 1998 were similar, reading passages, unit preparation and evaluation questions and questions types changed in others published later then. In the end, the researcher states some suggestions over the detected problems.