---
title: "History of education"
chunk: 15/16
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:59:32.171634+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

In the 1920s and 1930s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) imposed radical educational reforms in trying to modernize Turkey. He first separated governmental and religious affairs. Education was the cornerstone of this effort. In 1923, there were three main educational groups of institutions. The most common institutions were medreses based on Arabic, the Qur'an, and memorization. The second type of institution was idadî and sultanî, the reformist schools of the Tanzimat era. The last group included colleges and minority schools in foreign languages that used the latest teaching models in educating pupils. The old medrese education was modernized. Atatürk changed classical Islamic education for a vigorously promoted reconstruction of educational institutions. He linked educational reform to the liberation of the nation from dogma, which he believed was more important than the Turkish War of Independence. He declared:

Today, our most important and most productive task is the national education [unification and modernization] affairs. We have to be successful in national education affairs and we shall be. The liberation of a nation is only achieved through this way."
In 1924, Atatürk invited American educational reformer John Dewey to Ankara to advise him on how to reform Turkish education. Unification was put into force in 1924, making education inclusive and organized on a model of the civil community. In this new design, all schools submitted their curriculum to the "Ministry of National Education", a government agency modeled after other countries' ministries of education. Concurrently, the republic abolished the two ministries and made clergy subordinate to the  Department of Religious Affairs, one of the foundations of secularism in Turkey. The unification of education under one curriculum ended "clerics or clergy of the Ottoman Empire", but was not the end of religious schools in Turkey; they were moved to higher education until later governments restored them to their former position in secondary after Atatürk's death.
In the 1930s, at the suggestion of Albert Einstein, Atatürk hired over a thousand established academics, including world-renowned émigré professors escaping the Nazi takeover in Germany. Most were in medicine, mathematics, and natural science, plus a few in the faculties of law and the arts. Germany's exiled professors served as directors in eight of twelve Istanbul's basic science Institutes, as well as six directors of Istanbul's seventeen clinics at the Faculty of Medicine.

=== Africa ===

Education in French-controlled West Africa during the late 1800s and early 1900s was different from the nationally uniform compulsory education of France in the 1880s.  "Adapted education" was organized in 1903 and used the French curriculum as a basis, replacing information relevant to France with "comparable information drawn from the African context".  For example, French lessons of morality were coupled with many references to African history and local folklore.  The French language was also taught as an integral part of adapted education.
Africa has more than 40 million children. According to UNESCO's Regional overview on sub-Saharan Africa, in 2000 only 58% of children were enrolled in primary schools, the lowest enrolment rate of any region.  The USAID Center reports as of 2005, forty percent of school-aged children in Africa do not attend primary school.

== Recent world-wide trends ==

Today, there is some form of compulsory education in most countries. Due to population growth and the proliferation of compulsory education, UNESCO has calculated that in the next 30 years, more people will receive formal education than in all of human history thus far.
Illiteracy and the per centage of populations without any schooling have decreased in the past several decades. For example, the percentage of the population without any schooling decreased from 36% in 1960 to 25% in 2000.
Among developing countries, illiteracy and percentages without schooling in 2000 stood at about half the 1970 figures.  Among developed countries, figures for illiteracy rates differ widely. Often it is said that they decreased from 6% to 1%. Illiteracy rates in less economically developed countries (LEDCs) surpassed those of more economically developed countries (MEDCs) by a factor of 10 in 1970 and by a factor of about 20 in 2000.  Illiteracy decreased greatly in LEDCs, and virtually disappeared in MEDCs.  Percentages without any schooling showed similar patterns.
Percentages of the population with no schooling varied greatly among LEDCs in 2000, from less than 10% to over 65%.  MEDCs had much less variation, ranging from less than 2% to 17%.
Since the mid-20th century, societies around the globe have undergone an accelerating pace of change in economy and technology.  Its effects on the workplace, and thus on the demands on the educational system preparing students for the workforce, have been significant.  Beginning in the 1980s, government, educators, and major employers issued a series of reports identifying key skills and implementation strategies to steer students and workers towards meeting the demands of the changing and increasingly digital workplace and society.  21st-century skills are a series of higher-order skills, abilities, and learning dispositions that have been identified as being required for success in 21st-century society and workplaces by educators, business leaders, academics, and governmental agencies.  Many of these skills are also associated with deeper learning, including analytic reasoning, complex problem solving, and teamwork, compared to traditional knowledge-based academic skills.

== See also ==
Factory model school
History of childhood
Social history#History of education
History of childhood care and education

== References ==