ABSTRACT
The following thesis is an attempt to approach and investigate the educational policy and its target of the Italian conquerors during the occupation of the island of Kos by them (1912-1943).
This occupation, according to researchers, is divided into 3 periods.
The first period was from 1912 to 1923 during which there were no significant alterations in the Greek educational system as the Italian –until the Lausanne treaty was signed- were temporary occupants and didn’t change the preferential status applying to the Greek Orthodox education during the Ottoman occupation.
The second period of the Italian occupation lasted from 1923 till 1936, just after the Lausanne treaty was signed and which declared the Dodecanese islands an Italian colony. This was when the first substantial interventions of the Italians in the Greek education began attempting to form a new functional education system.
Finally, the third period, 1936-1943, was the period of major educational degradation imposed by the conquerors.
Great effort was made in this thesis to show and analyze the interventions of the Italian conquerors in the administration and organization of the Greek Orthodox education. This attempt was based on researching Italian archive material as well as consulting a great amount of bibliography.
The highlighting years in this study are: a) 1916 when the Education Supervising Bureau was set up which aimed to continuously supervising education b) 1926 when the School Decree came into effect according to which the Greek Orthodox education was subject to government supervision, thus leaving the Greek Church with no administrative duties and finally 1936 when a new School Decree simulated Greek schools with Italian ones.
The analysis of the institutional framework leads us to the conclusion that the Italian tutors’ educational targets were exactly the same as the political targets of the Italians, differentiating only in the teaching methods used in each of these 3 periods.
Consequently, the complete supervision of the Greek Education, which was systematically sought after by the Italians, fulfilled their great expectation; the fundamental alteration of the Dodecanese from Greek to Italian, thus creating the conditions of the islands’ utter dehellenization.