Bir Sosyal Politika Projesi Olarak Köy Enstitüleri
Village Institutes as a Social Policy Project

Summary/Abstract: This study mainly aims to evaluate the Village Institutes of Early Turkish Republic as a social policy project. The Institutes, which existed between 1940 and 1954, were mainly established upon some political, social, economic and cultural objectives. However those schools have mostly been evaluated with reference to their ideological dimensions rather than being analyzed as a social policy implementation. Indeed, this project was developed in order to eliminate the relative deprivation of some disadvantaged population in reaching to education, besides serving as an ideological apparatus. Thus, although the project certainly had political implications; early Republican administration implemented this social policy project without considering any linguistic, ethnic, racial, religious, sectarian, regional, or sexual discrimination like an ideal welfare state had to do. In this context, the claim of this research is that the Village Institutes of the Early Turkish Republic, which occupied a noticeable position in the whole history of Turkish political and educational history, should be considered as a social democratic social policy implementation. As organized by a group of people, who were aware of the importance of the “education” in human development, the project mainly aimed to eradicate various dimensions of the inequalities among the citizens of the state, especially inequalities between the individuals of urban and rural settlements. At this regard, the project Village is analyzed in detail as a social policy implementation in this study, mainly emphasizing the dimensions that make this model as social democratic.

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