Enderun School

The Enderun School (Ottoman Turkish: اندرون مکتب, romanized: Enderûn Mektebi) was a palace school and boarding school within Topkapi Palace. It was mostly for princes of the court and the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire. Students here were primarily recruited via devşirme, a system of the Islamization of abducted Christian slave children for serving the Ottoman government in bureaucratic, managerial, and Janissary military positions. Over the centuries, the Enderun School was fairly successful in generating Ottoman statesmen by drawing among the empire's various ethnic groups and giving them a common Muslim education. The school was run by the "Inner Service" (Enderûn) of the Ottoman palace and had both academic and military purposes. The graduates were expected to devote themselves to government service and be free of links to lower social groups. The Enderun School's gifted education program has been called the world's first institutionalized education for the gifted.