Muallim Cevdet, one of the late Ottoman intellectuals, stands as a unique portrait in terms of his pedagogy, professional ethics, sensitivity to his surroundings, ability to read the spirit of the time, and his courageous stance amidst the conditions of his era. His work and legacy concerning education, training, books, libraries, and wisdom hold a special place for containing the values that make a shared national and spiritual identity possible. Beyond a heroic defense of history, he lived a life of teaching, exerting superior efforts as a conscious educator who embraced his past and sought to build a solid future upon that accumulation. Deeply grasping the value of the human being and the social environment that shapes them, Cevdet was able to offer safe harbors and anchors to the generations he was raising. Throughout his professional life, which began as a high school teacher, he made remarkable contributions to our cultural life through the services he rendered in areas such as the protection of books, libraries, archives, and valuable documents, as well as the works he authored. Reading the life story of this exceptional figure of our educational and cultural history, especially his Memoirs of Childhood and Teaching in his own words, will be horizon-broadening in terms of understanding and penetrating the world of an era.

His childhood memoirs and those of his nearly half-century of teaching, the full text of which has not been published until now, have been prepared for publication in this study in their original form. Thus, one can witness interesting information and observations about the primary, secondary, and higher education life of a young person in the late Ottoman period, his teachers, the books he read, and his educational circle. His actions and writings regarding the teaching profession also have a consciousness-raising quality for our national education life and the community of teachers, in terms of comparing and evaluating experiences from the past. While recounting his teaching experiences in his memoirs, Cevdet also penned a text titled The Manners of Teaching, which serves as a unique "teacher's memorandum." In our nearly 180-year history of modern teacher training, this text, which is one of the most original on the subject, has been included in this collection both in its simplified and original forms. We hope that active, responsible teachers and teacher candidates will be able to learn much from it.