This book represents a major study of the development and present state of education in Turkey. Turkey offers a unique context for studying education because of the tensions that exist between secularization and Islam, top-down social engineering and democratization, and economic growth and social justice. Education in Turkey brings together some of the leading educationalists in Turkey, as well as a number of scholars from other disciplines. The topics covered include the development and structure of primary, secondary, vocational and adult education, the role of education in shaping citizenship and national identity, human capital, economic growth and educational inequalities. This significant volume will be of particular interest to policy makers as well as researchers and students in education, economics, politics, and Turkish studies.

Offers a novel perspective on the establishment of the Turkish nation state and highlights how the Young Turk regime, from 1913 to 1950, subjected Eastern Turkey to various forms of nationalist population policies aimed at ethnically homogenizing the region and including it in the Turkish nation state.

Control over education has been a keenly contested area since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in Turkey. Central to this contest has been the question of whose values would be passed down to future generations, with the inculcation of gender segregation in primary schools a key marker in ongoing cultural battles over Turkey's secularist founding principles and the growing dominance of Islamist political movements. This book offers an in-depth analysis of gender inequality in action in the Turkish schooling system by examining changes in education provision and culture in the years since 2012. Based on two school ethnographies conducted in an AKP-dominated district of Istanbul where the author worked as a teacher and researcher, it examines neoliberal education policies and their co-option by the AKP and other Islamist movements to promote their own agendas, while also considering the effects of the struggle between rival Islamist groups. Grounding its theoretical approach with empirical evidence of ideology in action, it provides an important analysis of the way in which boys and girls are socialized in Turkey's public schooling system.

This first comprehensive study on Ottoman educational reform is based on archival material and providing new information on curricular policies applied in the provinces and toward different ethnic groups.