The purpose of this qualitative study was to evaluate both the positive and negative changes in the aims and practices of current schools and, in addition, identify teacher values that have influenced the Turkish educational system from the early years of the Turkish Republic till now. With this in mind, a set of semi structured open-ended questions were directed to 50 retired teachers in Ankara, Samsun, and Corum. Questions aimed to identify the comparative views and thoughts on education, living conditions, and teaching objectives between 1940 and 2006. The information for eight study problems were listed, grouped and summarized in ten-year sessions. For descriptive purposes, Microsoft Excel version 7.00 was used in order to provide frequencies, percentages, and graphical representations of the data for the first two questions. The answers to the remaining six questions were categorized and conceptualized line by line for each respondent. According to the results, there have been noteworthy changes on the teachers' perceptions regarding the values, such as the goals of education, human rights, participation, productivity, creativity, and critical thinking over time. In addition, old photographs, memories, diaries and letters that belong to the participating retired teachers were used as the study materials. As the result, the emerging themes were summarized in order to demonstrate the changes in the teacher values over the years, from the early days of the Republic to today.