İDADI SCHOOLS

Ottoman middle or secondary schools.

In the late nineteenth century, İdadi schools provided three years of intermediate and low secondary-level education. Instruction was in Turkish and French. The curriculum included logic, economics, geography, world and Ottoman history, algebra and arithmetic, the physical sciences, and engineering.

In the 1850s the military opened the first provincial Idadi schools in Baghdad, Erzurum, and Sarajevo. The first nonmilitary, state-run İdadi school opened in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in the 1870s. Under the 1869 Regulation for Public Instruction, towns and cities were required to provide one İdadi school for every thousand households. By 1895, about one-third of a total of thirty thousand students attending intermediate school in the Ottoman Empire were enrolled in the fifty-five state and military İdadi schools, the latter being found in every province. The other two-thirds of students attended the seventy millet system–run İdadi schools or the sixty-three foreign ones, such as American-run Robert College in Constantinople. State-run İdadi schools were financed by taxes. The term İdadi schools was changed in 1908 to sultani schools, and in 1925 in Turkey, to orta or middle schools.

See also millet system; sultani schools.

Bibliography

Kazamias, Andreas M. Education and the Quest for Modernity in Turkey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3d edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

elizabeth thompson