Students as Their Educational Experiences in the 1980s ’ Turkey ⃰

The objective of this study is to bring out the period perception of 1980’s period primary school students with their own words via center-periphery and gender variables. As it is known that the period perception of individuals cannot appear independent from the political and socio-economic conditions in which they are. It is possible to find out so many developments about the political, social and economic history of different periods of the societies in the written documents. However, the documents presenting about the primary school’s children’s perception of the period in which their childhood is constructed is so limited. Therefore, the children as a prominent part of society, the narratives reflecting their periodic perception will let them be both the subjects and objects of history. Only oral history uncovers the children’s (being excluded from historiography) periodic perception with their original narratives. This, on the one hand democratizes the nature of history, on the other hand it enriches it with its critical and transformative mission. In this study I had totally thirty-two interviews, two of which are for testing, including fifteen women and fifteen men who had their primary school education in 1980s. I recorded the interviews by a recording device and decoded them. I tried to reconstruct their period perception via their narratives