Baltacio Smail Hakk (1 results)

First and sole edition of this rare educator's guide to teaching geography, written by a prominent member of Turkey's Education Reform Movement after the Young Turk triumvirate had come to power. We locate only 12 copies in institutional libraries (one in Germany, 11 in the United States). The author, smail Hakk Baltac o lu (1886 - 1978), was renowned as Turkey's leading pedagogue in the opening decades of the 20th century. He became the first rector of Istanbul University in 1924, and would later serve as a deputy in the Turkish parliament. In addition to the present guide to teaching geography, he published similar works on the pedagogy of English, writing and drawing. To a degree, he drew on the European school system, to which he was exposed during his travels in 1910 and 1911. The volume offers lesson plans with scripts that imagine dialogues between teachers and students. One such exchange shows how a teacher might get children to draw a plan of their classroom, engaging with the principles of spatial description without depending on sophisticated equipment, which would have been in short supply at the time. The plates and folding colour charts show how discussions of historical monuments and statistics can be integrated into classes. Octavo, pp. 39, [1]. Text in Ottoman Turkish. With 19 black and white plates, 4 interleaved folding colour charts. Plate 6 misnumbered. Wire-stitched in the original printed wrappers. Short closed tears to edges of wrappers, tanning to rear wrapper. Closed tear to folding colour chart, not affecting image. A good copy.…