The First Scientific Committee (Birinci Heyet-i İlmiye) and Its Rules of Procedure

Scientific Committee (Heyet-i Ilmiye) meetings, in which educational problems were discussed and educational policies were determined according to the thoughts and the experiences of contemporary educators, were held three times starting from a few months before proclamation of the Republic until 1926. This study is about the First Scientific Committee meeting held between 15 July and 15 August 1923; and accordingly this study aims to reveal the people attended the meeting, the commissions established in the meeting, working styles of the commissions, and the subjects discussed and the decissions taken in these commissions. The methodology of this study is historical research and the data were collected through document analysis. With this methodology, papers on the topic of the First Scientific Committee meetings published between June and August 1923 in the newspapers of “Hâkimiyet-i Milliye”, “Anadolu’da Yenigün”, “İkdam” were investigated. While the names, institutions and missions of the people who participated in the meeting can be determined, the information of the institutions that these people represented and how many people participated in the meeting cannot be given exactly. Large agenda topics of the Committee for education were determined by Ministry of Education before the Scientific Committee meeting and all the agenda topics were discussed. Members of the Scientific Committee worked in the groups consisted of 15-20 people, and the members mostly participated in more than one group.