Attempts to encourage greater – and friendlier – contacts with Western Europe meant that by the year 1900, the Ottoman state had given international organisations permission to run 702 primary and secondary schools. Of these, 465 – the single largest share – were led by missionaries from the US, and 100 of these schools had been established during the past twenty years alone. American schools were so popular with parents that in Anatolia one in three school-age children was enrolled at such a school. Why were they so popular? One explanation seems to be that they were not just educational institutions; through these schools, children and their families were able to access the modern hospitals, pharmacies and printing facilities which the schools had established alongside their teaching function. Yet this presented a dilemma for the rulers. They wanted a degree of foreign influence in their educational system, but they did not want the system itself to be taken over by Washington, something which seemed to be in danger of happening. In one official report, for example, the minister for education described the American schools system as an ‘epidemic disease’.
The government felt that it had to act. It would have liked to close the schools down, but recognised that this would lead to serious diplomatic problems. Instead, it ordered the schools to reapply for permission to teach. In addition, the American schools were told that they could no longer recruit Muslim students, nor could they locate their premises in areas where Muslims were the majority community. After much foot-dragging, the schools agreed to reapply for permission to teach, but they did not stop enrolling Muslim pupils. When the US government was pushed on this, it replied that the US, like France, Britain and Russia, had millions of nationals who were Muslims; it would change its enrolment policy only if all other foreign schools did so, too. America was too big a power for the Ottomans to mess with, and the matter was quietly dropped.
