107. Today in 1920s Turkey: 27 August 1928 (Not-So-Back-to-School Edition)
Türkçe:
[Lüleburgaz’da ilk erkek mektebi talebesi idman taalimleri yaparken]
Yeni harfleri muallimler öğrenininceye kadar mektepler açılamayacak. Yani mekteplerin açılması iki üç hafta geçecek.English:
Students while doing physical exercises at the first boy’s school in Lüleburgaz.
Schools will not be able to open until teachers learn the new letters. Meaning, the opening of schools will exceed two to three weeks.
Comments:
This photograph carries with it the news of schools opening late this year — no doubt a welcome development for youngsters! The relatively new publication, Babacan was a bi-weekly people’s journal. The paper often included both national and local news stories accompanied by photographs or illustrations. Local news stories, along with jokes, poems, short stories and advertisements were allocated to the inner two pages (pp. 2–3) of the broadsheet. The present story is both local and national in that it describes a nationally relevant news story but uses a photograph from a provincial school to illustrate it. Such editorial decisions served to reinforce the sense of a unified nation community. The photograph of the children performing exercises in unison contributes to the “ideal” of uniformity, order, and cohesion most valued in nationalist ideologies.
If it’s not already obvious, I chose to discuss this image because of the students’ clothes, which reminded me of classic, striped prison uniforms… The photograph both amused me, and reminded me of how school used to feel ca. ages 5–17.
Yet I digress. The impending alphabet reform was the reason that schools were delayed that year. In August of 1928 the decision was made to change the country’s official alphabet for communication from the Arabic letters to the Latin script. This massive initiative was part of a greater series of reforms legislated during the first few years of the Turkish Republic (est. 1923). Since the law would not be enforced until the end of the year, autumn of 1928 was spent organizing programs to educate the educators on the new script. Since there is overlap between the Fall season and schools recommencing, the opening of schools needed to be set aside while the teachers were brought up to speed with the new script. Thus, this news blurb reports on one of the many “preparations” that were undertaken in the months and weeks leading up to alphabet reform.
Originally published at https://steemit.com on August 27, 2017.
