A Turkish Intellectual Between Marxist Politics and Durkheim’s Pedagogy: Sadrettin Celâl Antel and History Teaching

Abstract

Sadrettin Celâl Antel is one of the important pedagogues of the Turkish education history. He lived between 1890 and 1954. This study aimed to reveal the pedagogical mentality of Sadrettin Celâl Antel and his contributions to history teaching. Survey method and document analysis to analyze the data was employed in the study. In this context, the present study examined the undergraduate thesis entitled "Liselerde Tarih Randımanı (1949-1950) [Productivity of History in High Schools]" prepared by Refref Çelebioğlu under the advisement of Sadrettin Celâl Antel in Istanbul University Faculty of Letters Institute of Pedagogy. The research data were analyzed through descriptive analysis. It was found out that Sadrettin Celâl, who had a progressive and polytechnic pedagogical mentality, closely followed the contemporary developments in pedagogy in Europe and the USA. It was also understood that while he adopted an approach supporting Durkheim in his works about the teaching of the history course in schools in accordance with the objectives of the national history, he partly employed the Marxist perspective in the creation of the content of the history course. It was determined that he not only developed an enjoyable game named “History Raffle” for the history course, but also made an important contribution to discussions about the productivity of history teaching in high schools in terms of the classical theory with the undergraduate thesis he supervised.