Abstract
In the history of modern Iran, the 1960s saw an acceleration of domestic and international efforts at providing education to Iranians of all ages, in all corners of the country. When Mohammad Reza Shah launched his ‘White Revolution’ in 1963, chief among these social reforms was a renewed focus on improving educational opportunities for all Iranians. Through partnerships with various domestic and international organizations, the Iranian government invested in the construction and repair of elementary and secondary schools, established the Literacy Corps (Sepah-e Danesh) to provide schooling in the provinces, produced millions of new textbooks at the elementary through university levels, and supported the creation of educational media such as books, magazines, and television and radio programs. Though both the Shah and his wife, the Empress Farah Pahlavi, took great pride in their projects related to improving education and literacy, the practical aspects of such an endeavor proved a significant logistical challenge for a population still living mostly outside the urban centers. This paper thus seeks to understand both the shape that education took in the rural areas as well as the practical aspects of achieving mass education in a time when much of the population was rurally situated.
My project builds on David Menashri’s foundational work concerning the history of education in Iran by expanding the discussion to focus on projects carried out in Iranian villages and rural areas. Drawing on oral histories as well as the archives of UNESCO, the Ford Foundation, the U.S. State Department, and the Franklin Book Program’s offices in Tehran and Tabriz, I argue that education in rural Iran was achieved through the cooperation between a number of domestic and international entities. I outline the different strategies employed by the various organizations involved in spreading literacy throughout Iran in the two decades before the revolution, as well as their creative solutions to media distribution which allowed for efficient and direct delivery of educative materials and personnel to needy areas.
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