Özet:

In the 19th century, many men and women travelers came to the lands of the Ottoman Empire, and writing down their observations, heard, and lived, they produced many works about the social structure of the Ottoman Empire. These travel books, which have important historical sources and also carry the cultural transfer to future generations, gave special importance to the Ottoman education system. Undoubtedly, the primary reason for this is the important role of education plays in the construction of a society. Travelers' perspectives on the education system were also based on their own experiences, research, and different cultural, religious, or ideological backgrounds. The works of female travelers were influenced by the general tendencies of the period and their own subjective experiences. Thus the accuracy of the inferences made by the travelers who visited schools and educational institutions in different countries and wrote about how the education system worked and observed the students should be confirmed. The travelers discussed in the study sometimes acted with prejudice and an Orientalist attitude. While making their criticisms, they did not mention the education inequality in the 19th-century Victorian Period, especially ignoring that children did not receive a qualified education then. They saw the educational reforms that were tried to be carried out in the 19th century in the Ottoman Empire as a peculiarity of the backward East. They tried to analyze society with the inferences they made on education with essentialist approaches. Their common attitude is that the reforms carried out in this century were insufficient. The study will discuss the books of four British female travelers who took bold steps to explore the world and travel in the 19th century, the stages of the Ottoman Empire's education system, and the travelers' perspectives on education will be examined in detail.

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