Village Institutes of the Republic

The Village Institutes were founded upon egalitarian principles in 7 regions and 21 different locations across Turkey. The aim of these Institutes was to liberate villagers through education and culture and to provide a means to enlightenment for Anatolian villages, which were enduring middle-ages like conditions at the time, and through this to rejuvenate the whole country in the social, cultural and education spheres. In this sense the Village Institutes were a social transformation project.


The education provided by these institutes utilized a secular, democratic and scientific curriculum with a student-centered pedagogy, which aimed to help participants realize their full human potential. Unfortunately, through a forced change in their curricula in 1947, Village Institutes were hollowed out and were then officially terminated in 1952.
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Widely accepted by academics and civil society institutions as having helped students develop and further all aspects of their potentials by bringing out and nurturing their creative strength through the application of learner focused, democratic and humanistic pedagogic principles, the Village Institute system with its focus on the person remains relevant to this date.
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                                               İsmail Hakkı Tonguç
                             and Photographs
                                                                                                                                      by Engin Tonguç

I closely witnessed the Village Institute movement during the years of my childhood and adolescence. I participated in some of the inspection journeys of my father, then-General Director of Primary Education ismail Hakki Tongug; I even visited areas of Turkey that were quite difficult to access under the conditions of the period. One of the highlights of these journeys in­volved my father, constantly taking photographs with the camera he always carried around. I realized, over time, that this was far beyond a mere hobby or inter­est, but rather a serious and systematic occupation that entailed certain objectives. I recall a typical im­age of him: with the indispensible camera in his hand, a burly, affable middle-aged man dressed in an open shirt with no tie, a sports jacket of sorts, and golf pants. A man nothing like the serious looking execu­tives of the period dressed in dark suits and ties, whom they found odd: ismail Hakki Tonguç, one of the founders of the Village Institutes!
Why was he constantly taking photographs? Be­fore I answer this question, I would like to address his relationship with photography.

In the 1932-1933 academic year, Tonguç opened the Department of Arts & Crafts at the Gazi Education Institute established in Ankara. Prior to that, in 1927, he arranged for five teachers to be sent to Europe to be trained for this department. One of these was Şinasi Barutçu, who studied photography and later contributed greatly to the development of the art of photography in Turkey. Upon their return, these indi­viduals became the first teachers of the department that Tonguç directed until 1935. The department also included a sub-department, class, and workshop of Photography and Film. We find that the department's 1934 curriculum also included a class on "photogra­phy and cinema." Apart from photography tech­niques, the program comprised the following sub­jects: landscape, images of people, animals and plants in their natural settings, capturing a given work or so­cial activities. Later, the Village Institute Curriculum of 1943 also listed photography among the courses within the arts and crafts program. Photography was taught as a branch of art at the Institutes. Many teach­ers, who studied at the Gazi Education Institute and later worked at village institutes followed Tonguç's lead and request, and accomplished an important task by taking countless photographs of their respec­tive institutes. Today, we can follow the entire history and activities of some institutes, such as Kızılçullu and Hasanoğlan, through the hundreds of photographs taken by teachers. Tonguç had also requested other schools and educational institutions outside Village Institutes to send photographs and albums demon­strating their endeavors. Today, a priceless photogra­phy archive comprised of thousands of photographs has thus emerged with the addition of the ones Ton­guç himself had taken.

I have cherished memories from my childhood in the 1930s that demonstrate the role photography played in my father's private life. In our vineyard house in Etlik, Ankara, he had an independent room annexed to the main building, which he used as a workshop and kept some agriculture and carpentry tools. A section of it served as a dark room. The room contained the necessary solvents, bottles, and tanks to develop photographs. I do not recall the technical details of the process. However, there were some glass negatives, which were preserved for many years and eventually lost; that they existed to begin with in­dicates that rather primitive photography methods were conducted. The photographs he took during that period mostly included family pictures or frames he captured during excursions and walks to nearby villages. I also do not remember the kind of camera he had. The camera he used during the Village Institute period and afterwards was a practical Rolleiflex. To­day, that particular camera is in the archive on dis­play. He also encouraged me to take photographs with the simple and cheap box camera he bought me during my childhood. In fact, I took some of his photo­graphs that survived to date with my primitive cam­era. It is interesting that someone who has taken so many photographs has only a few of his own. It ap­pears that he paid little attention to having his photo­graph taken. Conversely, we see that capturing the people around him, the surroundings, nature, and dif­ferent ways of life was a passion for him since his youth. This passion of an arts and crafts teacher, who first rushed to museums during his visits to a city abroad, continued unabatedly until the end of his life.

The weight Tonguç placed on visual arts was long­standing. In a letter he wrote that he was much im­pressed by a sound film he watched for the first time in Germany in 1929, that he ventured forth to import a truck with filming equipment with the funds he ap­propriated from the Ministry budget, but that he failed due to lack of support. In another letter he wrote, "I do not think that in the history of humanity over the last two generations, there is anything more phenomenal than the cinema, which has captured the world... Cinema has become an integral part of a modern person’s life... Film must be what the mod­ern, dynamic individual should embrace wholeheart­edly His studies on fine arts and arts & crafts in Germany and his dedication to the Enlightenment philosophy of establishing each concept by trans­forming it into provable, concrete data are the funda­mental reasons behind the importance he attached to visual studies like film and photography.

During his term at the Ministry's Directorate of School Museums, which was responsible for provid­ing modern classroom tools and equipment, Tonguç strived to popularize cameras for film and photogra­phy at schools, in the ensuing Village institute years, almost all the institutes had cameras and projectors; movie nights were organized on a regular basis. To­day, we find the callously discarded remnants of these machines in the junkyards of the remaining buildings of Village Institutes.
Another event in which film and photography was extensively used was the "Travelling Exhibition" Ton­guç organized on the tenth anniversary of the Repub­lic. The exhibition project entailed a train journey with specially designed exhibitions and education cars that traveled between Ankara and Samsun for two months, during which educational meetings were held for students and the public at intermediate sta­tions. We learn from the memoirs of participants that in the course of the exhibition, visual aids such as pho­tography and film were widely utilized.

In the years between 1936 and 1946, which can be defined as the Village Institute period, Tonguç's ob­jectives and reasons behind treating photography as a serious and systematic endeavor can be summarized as follows:

1- By transmitting the works at Village Institutes and the primary education movement into a visual medium, he sought to document these endeavors and prevent them from being forgotten. The subse­quent efforts to destroy Village Institutes and their memory prove how right he was in his quest. Many institutions have been forgotten or have been made to forget in Turkish history. Photographs have aided in preventing the same tragedy in the Village Institute movement. I do not thing that any other institution in our history has been documented to this extent with so many photographs.

2- The recognition of these endeavors not only verbally, but visually as well befits Tonguç's personal­ity, overall frame of mind, philosophy, and conception of education and work. Concretizing ideas and ac­tions, and visualizing them was much suited for an educator and an arts & crafts teacher, who had his own views and contentions. The correct transmission and description of implementations could only be possible through visual aids. Described by a writer friend as "the tetrad of measurement, geometry, sub­stance, and work," Tonguç's actions and desire to con­cretize each work with photographs were a natural consequence of his personality and his general ap­proach to work.

3- In addition, he must have thought that a much- debated initiative such as the Village Institutes, whose possibly bleak future aroused concern from the on­set, had to be supported with visual documents for future defense. Indeed, as the Village Institutes were being defended during the period after Tongug, these photographs served as strong and useful concrete evidence.

4- One of the important features of these photo­graphs was that Tonguç  never confined his subjects to Village Institutes. Meadows, mountains, trees, flow­ers, nature, roads, bridges, village houses, fields, life in villages, villagers, village children, work life, ancient monuments, buildings were among the subjects he was interested in. In short, the Anatolia of the thirties and forties was documented through his photo­graphs. These images offer a detailed, unhidden, and incontrovertible portrait of the social and economics       conditions of a country. This is also closely related to the objectives behind the initiatives undertaken through Village Institutes and the education move­ment. His attempts to paint a larger picture through photographs point to a revolutionary effort at Village Institutes to transform society far beyond an educa­tion and literacy campaign in the narrowest sense. These photographs attest to the desire to utilize edu­cation for a grander purpose.

As emphasized several times, the issue for Tonguç was not a limited village problem or a question of literacy, it was, indeed, fun­damentally the problem of a nation, a revolutionary change of society. As some researchers argue, per­haps the best way to understand him is not by focus­ing on Village Institutes to contextualize Tonguç, but by focusing on Tonguç  to understand Village Insti­tutes.
 
As an educator and thinker, his ideas and objec­tive should not be confined to Village Institutes. The richness, breadth, and diversity of the subjects in his photographs support this view. In short, these photo­graphs are not merely limited to identifying educa­tional efforts; instead, they offer important clues about his personality, views, philosophy of life, and goals.


*English version is provided from the publications of İstanbul Araştırmaları Enstitüsü.

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​Village Institutes in Turkey and

Cooperative Learning

By Ayfer Kocabasi
Dokuz Eylul University, Buca Educational Faculty,
Department of Primary Education, Buca, İzmir, Turkey

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European Journal of Education Studies
ISSN: 2501 - 1111
ISSN-L: 2501 - 1111
Volume 3 │ Issue 3 │ 2017

Link : 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxDXM8C-Z02nWHhBM0d1VWdwN3lqNTByT085V0JjSFVLblZz/view?usp=drivesdk
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