Abstract :
General cultural education in universities is generally expressed in the international literature by concepts such as general education, core curriculum or liberal education and has a very comprehensive content. One of the most important aims of general culture courses is to provide the necessary skills to form a good foundation before moving on to the department s scientific courses. These skills include written and oral communication, computer and information technologies, and mathematical thinking. The second main purpose of general culture education is to open up students minds to new academic study areas. This can be achieved through an interdisciplinary and free curriculum. The main objective of the study was to assess the general cultural education in teacher education programs implemented in Turkey through a historical perspective and international literature. In the research, document analysis method which is one of the qualitative research approaches was used. The main data source of the research was the teaching undergraduate programs and course contents developed by the Higher Education Council after 1980. In this context, 1983, 1998, 2006, 2013, 2017 and 2018 teaching undergraduate programs were examined. The data obtained from the documents were analyzed by content analysis technique. The findings obtained from these sub-themes were discussed by means of the relevant literature and field-specific evaluations were made. One of the most important reasons for the updates in the undergraduate programs of faculties of education was the fact that general culture education was ignored. The most important innovation made in 1998 programs is the addition of compulsory general culture courses in the 1982 program in addition to some elective general culture courses. After 1998, a program update was made again in 2006. In this update, increasing the number of general culture courses to 9 can be considered as one of the most positive decisions of the program development activities conducted in 2006.The undergraduate programs of the faculties of education were last updated in 2018. As of the third semester of undergraduate programs, elective courses have been added to each semester. In addition, common vocational knowledge courses as well as common general culture elective pools were established for all programs. General cultural education should be reorganized within the framework of concepts such as general education, core curriculum or liberal education as in developed countries. Multidimensionality in the management of general culture courses should be eliminated and coordinated from a center. Practical courses should be included more in general culture courses than theoretical courses. General culture courses should be re-evaluated according to the interdisciplinary approach. General culture courses should be determined and updated by taking into account the different student trends, interests and needs of the students. For this reason, courses should be established as elective courses. Academic studies on general culture education should be increased in teacher training and especially in the context of higher education.
