Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2015
At the end of World War I, senior Ottoman military officers and bureaucrats led the Turkish Muslim inhabitants of Anatolia in a struggle for national independence against invading European armies, under the command of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and his deputy, İsmet İnönü. Emerging victorious in the war, Atatürk and his associates had garnered sufficient national legitimacy and prestige to end the Ottoman sultanate and caliphate, establish a Turkish Republic, and embark on a series of interventions in politics and society known in Turkish parlance as the Kemalist Reforms/Revolutions. Recrafting the ethos, substance, and goals of schooling into a properly national education (millî terbiye) was one of the central components of this reform.