The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1768 to 1913 by Thomas W. Gallant

Author:Thomas W. Gallant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Figure 5.5 The Corinth Canal in 1905 © Library of Congress Prints and Photography Division.

Echoing back to Korais, Trikoupis believed in advancement through education and it was an issue very dear to his heart. Throughout his years in office, he pursued an aggressive policy of expanding Greece’s education system. Previously, this issue had received little attention, either legislatively or bureaucratically. For most of the nineteenth century, Greece had neither a fully financed, comprehensive public-school system nor a standardised programme of teacher preparation. Schools were locally funded – if they were funded at all – and the Lancastrian model was the norm (Nikolakaki 2013; Harlan 2011). It was not, however, the English model but the French one developed by the Socièté pour l’Instruction Public that most Greek communities adopted.

The most ambitious of the educational reform laws was introduced in 1889 by Yiorgos Theotokis, Trikoupis’s Minister of Education. It mandated, for example, the construction of no fewer than 217 new primary schools. In addition to there being more schools, they were now staffed by more (the same bill called for the hiring of 675 new people) and better-trained teachers. In a far-sighted move, he even introduced equal pay for both men and women teachers. Central control over the educational system was now firmly vested in the Ministry of Education and a special fund made up of public finances and private donations (called the Treasury for Primary Education) was created to support it (Damianakos 1977: 146–7; Dimaras 2003; 2006). Under Trikoupis’s leadership, then, public education expanded greatly: the number of university students between 1860 and 1900, for example, rose from 1,100 to 3,300; boys attending high school went from 6,000 to 24,000; boys enrolled in primary schools increased from 44,000 to 178,000 and girls from a mere 8,000 to over 82,000. Trikoupis, then, far-sightedly saw that social modernisation hinged on education.

In regard to the national issue and irredentism, Trikoupis had to confront them in the context of a rapidly changing international climate. Though he was not in power when the Plovdiv Revolution, the Bulgarian-Serbian war and the unification of Bulgaria occurred (1886), he still had to confront the challenges that a newly resurgent Bulgaria posed. He responded by modernising the armed forces and by trying to build closer ties to the Ottoman Empire. In regard to the latter, one of his novel policies, even though it failed, stands out as an important precedent. In 1890, Trikoupis proposed a law that called for the government to provide to the Muslim community, free of charge, state property in Piraeus that would be used for the construction of a mosque and its attendant buildings. This proposal was part of a package of confidence building measures that he was undertaking to try to ameliorate tensions between Athens and Istanbul. While the national question placed the two at loggerheads, the emergence of an aggressively irredentist Bulgaria threatened them both.

Moreover, after 1882, when Greece acquired a sizable Muslim population in Thessaly, the Porte made clear that how the kingdom treated it would be closely watched.

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