These teachers faced a dilemma. Either they took their modernising mission seriously, caused offence without making any impression, and withdrew into ineffective resentful isolation, or they tried to lead a normal social life, yielding to the conservative pressures of the village community, and living as much like a traditional villager as the job of actually teaching the children allowed. Their difficulties are graphically portrayed by one of them, Mahmut Makal, who wrote a series of books, the first of which was Turkey's best seller to date (Makal 1950, 1952, etc.).
The primary course which they taught officially lasted five years, from seven to twelve, since altered to run from six to eleven. Children often began late, partly due to the irregularity of registration of birth, partly to the opposition of some parents to school altogether. Many failed to finish the course. The curriculum included reading, writing and arithmetic, history and geography, civics and some elementary science. But the subjects were taught largely by rote, and in spite of lip service in high places to making village education relevant to village life, in fact it appeared to the villagers to have no relevance at all. Reading, writing, and number apart, what was taught was largely mumbo-jumbo to the children. Education was something which belonged not to the village but to the outside world, where the skills and the knowledge it taught might conceivably serve some purpose.
Traditionally, knowledge is religious knowledge, and the learned in village eyes are always religiously learned. One hears stories of village sages in the past whose knowledge of books was so great that they could work wonders, and knew what was happening in other places without being informed. The new secular teaching in the infidel alphabet is not well regarded. But the recent production of cheap religious pamphlets in the new script which enables the new literates to memorise religious texts more easily has helped somewhat to make for its acceptance. And even in 1950 the strongest opponents of the new teaching had no serious hope of its disappearance.
Within the village literacy served little purpose. No news-