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Vernacular Education: A Cradle of Nationalism or Something Else?
Abstract
During the Nineteenth century, Ottoman Christian subjects began to build new elementary schools taught in the vernacular languages. Those schools are often considered as the cradles of nationalism, and even claimed to be the forerunners of political independence. It is true that the vernacular schools prepared the future cadre of nationalist leadership, but not all the graduates became political activists. The principle of education, needless to say, was to provide children with better knowledge for their future career, and not to train nationalist fighters. We should not, therefore, oversimplify the meaning of vernacular schooling. The teaching in vernacular started as a tool to facilitate the effective education that had been taught in Greek. The quest of efficiency continued even after the fall of Greek preponderance over the Christian education. The vernacular schools remained as auxiliary to the higher institutions that instructed children in French, Greek, Turkish, etc. The vernacular learning had another vulnerability. As vernacular schools were usually founded and conducted by small parish communities, many of them could not provide constant and enough qualified lectures. In order to overcome the weakness, some managers requested state protection, creating the room where the Ottoman policy of public education could infiltrate among the Christian subjects. In his discussion, the author will examine the several aspects of junction between the Ottoman integrationist policies with the Christian aspiration for better education, by picking up the Danube Province in the 1870s.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Balkans
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries