imams. Atatürk's reforms on education made education much more accessible: between 1923 and 1938, the number of students attending primary schools increased by 224% from 342,000 to 765,000, the number of students attending middle schools increased by 12.5 times, from around 6,000 to 74,000 and the number of students attending high schools increased by almost 17 times, from 1,200 to 21,000. Militarization of education Military training was added to the curriculum of secondary education with the support of Mustafa Kemal who stated "just as the army is a school, so is the school an army". He was also in favor of deploying army sergeants as teachers. Coeducation and the education of girls In 1915, during the Ottoman period, a separate section for girl students named the İnas Darülfünunu was opened as a branch of the İstanbul Darülfünunu, the predecessor of the modern Istanbul University. Atatürk was a strong supporter of coeducation and the education of girls. Coeducation was established as the norm throughout the educational system by 1927. Centuries of sex segregation under Ottoman rule had denied girls equal education, Atatürk thus opposed segregated education as a matter of principle. The matter of coeducation was first raised as a result of a controversy in Tekirdağ in 1924, where, due to the lack of a high school for girls, girls requested enrollment in the high school for boys. Upon this, works on coeducation began and the Minister of Education declared that both sexes would follow the same curriculum. In August 1924, it was decided that coeducation would be introduced to primary education, giving boys the right to enroll in girls' high schools and vice versa. Atatürk declared in his Kastamonu speech in 1925 that coeducation should be the norm. Whilst the educational committee had agreed in 1926 to abolish single-sex education in middle schools that were not boarding schools, segregation persisted in middle and high schools, and statistics in the 1927–28 educational year revealed that only 29% of those enrolled in primary schools were girls. This figure was 18.9% for middle schools and 28% for high schools. Acting on these figures, 70 single-sex middle schools were converted to coeducational schools in 1927–28 and new coeducational middle schools were established. This was despite the opposition of Köprülüzade Fuat Bey, the Undersecretary for Education. Whilst the policy was transition to coeducational high schools based on the success in middle schools from 1928 to