Blurb:

The political management system in any government determines educational policy and its effective implementation process, and this, in fact, varies from country to country. In order to understand the current laic/secular education policy in Turkey, all the debates, experiences and implementation that spanned from the Ottoman period until the emergence of the Republic of Turkey need to be scrutinized. Indeed, the political, social, cultural and educational policies of the Republic period in modern Turkey were especially affected by the acceleration of modernization in the Ottoman “Tanzimat Reform Era (1839)”.
This study bases its analysis, first, on the general framework that draws significantly upon the relationship between the state and religion that can be traced back to the Ottoman period, second, it will look at the intellectual legacy of the modernization / westernization process in the Turkish Republic, and, finally, the introduction of laic/secular education policies will be scrutinized. Moreover, the secular education policies applied in the construction of modern Turkey, particularly, the ways they shaped religious education and affected the religious education curriculum and teachers’ training models will be the object of this study.