ABSTRACT
The Reza Shah period (1921-1941) continues to be one of the most understudied as well as controversial episodes in Iran’s modern history. Assessments of the period tend to be politically charged and reflect the widely diverging opinions about the extent and quality of its transformative nature. They rarely involve an appreciation of the effectiveness of the measures taken in this period in relation to stated policy objectives and allowing for the circumstances and conditions of the time-something which is quite common when it comes to evaluating, say, the reforms of Peter the Great in eighteenthcentury Russia or those of Muhammed Ali in nineteenth-century Egypt. Instead, they frequently narrow down to a moral verdict that weighs the entire age on a retrospective scale of Iran’s historical development since the mid-to latenineteenth century. The moral assessment of Reza Shah’s reign, whether characterized as the inception of an ‘auspicious age’ (‘asr-i farkhundah) or a period marked by the ‘elimination of the most basic human rights, and the establishment of a brutal dictatorship’, all too often prevents a sober analysis of its nature, in its achievements as well as in its failures. 1
Following these antithetical judgements, the educational record of the Reza Shah period has been alternatively labeled ‘consistent with [a] general attitude of pseudo-modernist etatism,’ and ‘a break away from the lethargy and backwardness of Qajar rule.’ 2 This chapter aims to steer clear of such ideological extremes while attempting to assess the role of education as an agent of social change during the reign of Reza Shah. Rather than using what Iran’s ruler should have achieved or avoided as criteria in evaluating Reza Shah’s educational policy, I propose to present an inventory of the educational measures taken in the 1920s and 1930s and to examine these within the ideological context of the time. By focusing on modernization, centralization, and nationalism as three objectives and guidelines envisioned in and implemented through these measures, we may gain a picture that views change from a contextual rather than a totalizing perspective.
