Politics and Literacy Programs in Pre-Revolutionary Iran
Willard Uncapher
A Lecture for the International Communications Association
TrinityCollege, Dublin, Ireland
[The following paper looks at literacy as a social construction, and the implementation of literacy programs as embodying implicit political agenda, taking Iran as its focus. These qualities of literacy are often unacknowledged in programs promoting literacy as a sure path the modernity and modern social and economic organization. We explore the complex meanings associated with reading, the distinctions of reading and writing, and the different kinds of literacies. An implicit application of this text would be the need to consider the social politics of any kind of directed ‘literacy’ or technological skills program, such as in ‘computer literacy.’ We also consider the role of technologies such as the telegraph in upsetting the authority associated with different readings, readers, and leaders. Please note that the original lecture was written on a different piece of software, and so the textual formatting below may have changed from original]
The historical transition from agrarian to industrial based economies, often termed "development" or "modernization," has been associated with a transformation in mental and cultural outlook as well. Whereas the agrarian view was thought to be suspicious of change, relying more on tradition than rational calculation and investigation, the new opportunities of industrial and technological advancement seemed to demand the adoption of some new sort of rational and open attitude. In so far as modernization was to be planned for a society, a much more modern work force would likewise have to be created.
The European model seemed to bear this out. The ideas of the factory system, with its division of labor and mechanization of production had been put in practice by Italian textile merchants three or four hundred years prior to English Industrial revolution (Pacey 1983:28). The German scientific expertise at the time of the Industrial Revolution exceeded that of British. It was only when, whatever the reason, these two lines of development could be brought together, a change in technology and in the habits of the work force, that the material benefits of the industrial revolution could be realized. While many additional elements obviously were needed for the British, their reserves of coal, the presence of Dutch capital, fear of Indian textile competition, the enduring lesson seemed to be that modernization needed not only technology, capital, energy, and market expansion, but also a modern work force at all levels of society.
More simply, if a society could somehow acquire the technical and capital inputs, then all that was left to be acquired was a forward looking, modern work force. And left to its own devices, this same work force could be an obstacle to change, blindly unable to recognize that change could be in its own best interest. The later development theories about the nature of a modernizing society, have their origins in 19th century social science, and ultimately in such Enlightenment writing as Comte. The presumed irrationality of religion as diagnosed by the Enlightenment had to become associated with the irrationality of its supporters. Hegel and the Hegelians, in emphasizing the role of reason in the process of historical development lead the perspective of someone like Marx who in the Grundissespoke of the necessity of the aware intellectual to speak for the voiceless proletariat. The point seems not simply that the 'masses' have need for an orator, but that, addicted to the opium of religion and other detritus of the past, they are unaware of the implications of their own situation, and thus are unmotivated to change it.
There were conflicting views of what would be necessary to create a 'modern' work force. The societies of old would be replaced, functionally in any case, by what Max Weber called the rational-legal structures and belief systems, and the attitudes of workers which may have worked in an era of more piece-meal production, and I use the term workers very broadly, would have to be replaced by more disciplined, schedule oriented outlook if they were work in industries. And people would have to become more 'open' and accustomed to evaluating change, and living in a pluralistic environment. And, according to some, people would have to be more willing to take responsibility for and to direct change within their own society.
Thus if national planners were to consider how to actively modernize their nation's economy, special consideration must be given to how to "modernize" the work force. A classic and optimistic consideration of the dynamics of this change is Daniel Lerner's Passing of Traditional Society (1958:59-62) which proposes a positive correlation between urbanization, literacy, exposure to media, and such consequences as political participation, "empathy" and "psychic mobility." The presence of literacy would help lift the inward looking peasant from a traditional orientation to a more modern, "empathetic" outlook; he or she would be able to acquire more information about what his or her choices were, and thus be able to participate more actively in society, and would be able to find out about the modern innovations in health and technology. With the channel open, the information of modernity could flow in.
Since then, if not before, literacy has assumed a prominent role in modernization programs, especially those conceived under the auspices of UNESCO. Literacy could even be taken as an index of modernity. Such faith seemed to be expressed in its intrinsic powers that whoever might acquire it could be said to be modern, to have faith in modernity, and to be ready to participate in the new industrial based economy. Conversely, those who "resisted" literacy were seen as "illiterates," which implied backward. They were unable or unmotivated enough to grasp the significance of the new. Therefore programs had to be organized to "motivate" them. What UNESCO proposed to do was be a clearing house for different organizational strategies by which to bring "literacy" to the people. Indeed to this day, most of their literacy literature has to do with organization, planning, and implementation (eg. Carron 1985)
The goal of "functional literacy" meant being able to read and write so as participate in everyday economic life. Literacy was therefore a thing, a uniform activity whose presence one could measure, and compare across societies. Implicit in this consideration of the role of literacy in modernization, but not so often explicitly stated, was an assumption that literacy by itself could produce some sort of cognitive changes in its possessors. This view has variously been called the 'autonomous' (Street 1984) and 'received' (Marvin 1984) or even Realist model of literacy. Literacy was itself catalyst and much research has gone into determining what the consequences of its acquisition might be.
According to Angela Hildyard and David Olson (1978:9), writing, by distancing the speaker from the hearer, and by engaging the literate in an attempt to create or interpret an "autonomous" text encourages the literate to consider the inherent logic of a statement, "to operate within the boundaries of sentence meaning." The peculiar logic which underlies this autonomous view somehow relegates the social into the 'interactive,' oral sphere, and the logical into the abstract, writerly sphere. Literacy, in its ideal form, somehow manages to dump any social associations, 'all things being equal,' while the oral, in its ideal form, is thought to operate with minimal attention to logical niceties. Even allowing for a certain rhetorical exaggeration, such a view should yield to empirical verification.
Such verification, say, in Luria (1976) describing his 1931 fieldwork in Uzbekistan on the effects of literacy and schooling presents a suspicious circularity. The increased logical functioning of the literates seems to indicate the respondents have learned how to speak in categories which connote (rather than denote) educated, proper discourse. Hildyard and Olson repeatedly cite Patricia Greenfield's (1972) examination the effects of schooling among the Wolof of Senegal. Her hypothesis "that context-dependent speech is tied up with context dependent thought, which in turn is the opposite of abstract thought" (1972:169) is backed, obviously, by inferences she must draw about the informativeness of speech and written events. Her conclusion as to the paucity of information in speech events depends a great deal on whether she was able to recognize the proper codes of the event, and was able to understand just the external restrictions incumbent on that particular expression, whether oral or literate. Such recognition would either depend on her oral/literate codes and her skill at recoding.
The point is not to puzzle the circularity of the evidence. Such a demonstration lies beyond the aim of this essay and has already been undertaken a bit discursively in Street (1984), and polemically in Fuglesang (1982). Whatever the ambiguous "evidence" finally is thought to demonstrate, the point is that literacy, like "modernity," is being conceived as a thing which, like a magic pill, is supposed to transform and liberate whoever swallows it. Literacy might not only modernize the society, by making new information available for example, it might by its very practice modernize and liberate the very thinking of the people that acquire it. It encourages a new depth in rationality, objectivity, as well as an ability to empathize with distant people and event. To bestow it on individuals seems not only an economic goal, but even a spiritual one: acquiring literacy frees one to participate in modern life; it enfranchises one; it extends the privileges of the minority to the masses; it breaks the manacles of the past, manacles one did not even know one had to endure until they were gone.
This enthusiasm for literacy programs was particularly in evidence in Iran in recent years. While there had been some foreign inspired state schools in Iran as early as 1851, reaching the number of no less than 50 by 1929 (Banini 1961:89), and a effort by Reza Shah to establish a state school system modeled on the French lycee in 1921, the efforts bore their results primarily in urban areas, and quite often the schools reached those already possessing some political or social status. One problem in expanding the school system was lack of qualified teachers. While a Teachers college was founded in Teheran in 1918, only gradually, with the appropriation of state funds for the training of some teachers abroad in 1928, and the Teacher Training Act of March 1934 did the number of qualified teachers gradually increase. The last act mandated the establishment of 25 teachers colleges by 1939, a goal that was exceeded. Secondly there was a need to prepare and publish adequate textbooks, a task that was begun by the Ministry of Education in 1928, based again on French models, and making use of the Persian language. (Banini 1961:94; Furter 1973:9-10).
Some institutional conflicts and funding problems complicated the expansion of the basic state educational infrastructure. Despite all the centralization of the ministry, according to Zonis, there were still the problems of overlapping and competitive sectors. The Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Arts and Culture, gradual autonomy for the 8 Universities, and the expansion of a literacy administration expanded the bureaucracy at the expense of capital investment and the raising of low teacher's salaries. (Zonis 1971:224; Green 1982:27). Still, considering the recent beginnings of system, considerable progress was being made, even if notable criticisms about funding still could be advanced. In 1922 only 15 students were graduated from the Dar-ul-Fonun, then considered the only secular institution of higher learning (Banini 1961:108). By 1966 the number of institutions of higher education was given as 48, only to triple to 148 by 1978. University enrollments jumped from 1 percent of the population ages 20-24 in 1960 to 5 percent in 1975 (World Bank 1979:171), and numerous students were being trained abroad (Green 1982:30).
Most of this educational expansion, however, was concentrated in the urban areas. A 1956 census by the government put the illiteracy rate in rural areas at 78 percent for men and 93 percent for women (Furter 1973:10). In 1961-62, while 79 percent of urban school age children could attend primary school, the availability to their rural compatriots was set at only 24 percent. The stated purpose of the 1962 reform package, usually called the "White Revolution" was to eliminate the gap between the rural and urban populace. Whatever the pressures leading to the genesis of this movement (eg. Halliday 1979:103-137), many aspects of the plan, in particular the Land Reform program which sought to buy back land from the landlords who controlled entire villages, and "return it to the tiller." sought to bring about basic social change. The Literacy Corps (or Educational Corps) sought to provide basic instruction for all children, as well as some adult literacy programs. The goals of this literacy program included such objectives as "stimulating local political activity." (Furter 1971:11) Without literacy how could the rural people become interested in and critically knowledgeable about local politics?
The literacy program was said to have at best mixed results. Despite an extensive organization allowing, for example, military draftees with secondary school education to do their service as primary school teachers ("sepahis"), the literacy rates did not change greatly in the rural areas. Even Furter writing for UNESCO mentions that in one program, of the 2,026 adults who attended the first half of a course, only 44 signed up to conclude it. While some effort went into better organization, there was also an effort to "motivate" people to become literate, to cast of "the burden of illiteracy” (see illustration). During the course of a special National Literacy Crusade in 1976 the Shah's wife, the Empress Ashraf visited the Crusade's activities in many provinces throughout the country, "issuing the necessary directives." (UNESCO 1978:92). The program kept in close contact with UNESCO world literacy program, and hoped for greater success by "decentralizing" the activities. The UNESCO document, listing the many conferences that were held and the many objectives that were formulated, and offering few statistics, ends with an organizational diagram. (UNESCO 1978:106)
Despite the stated objective of "decentralization," there is never any real indication as to how these programs were being received regionally, or even how literacy and those who possessed it were perceived. If literacy was merely a neutral technical competence to UNESCO and other modernization programs (Oxenham 1980:17), then such local differences were unimportant, being important in so far as they influenced the organization of the projects. However, evidence would suggest, as I will shortly demonstrate, that it would be naive not to consider such local perceptions and uses of literacy. If the UNESCO and other developmental literacy strategies seek to encourage "functional" literacy, so that the individual can function minimally in a "modern" society, then they must realize that, inversely, the promulgation of literacy also seeks to transform the social relations and conventions by which society "functions." Such interventions are rarely disinterested, or rarely remain disinterested.
In fact, the role and presence of literacy in Iran is particularly complex and is anything but heterogeneous throughout the society. It is well known, of course, that the area around Iran has the some of the earliest experience with writing, record keeping, and libraries in the world, as well as with the kind of bureaucracy that that sort of record keeping can produce. (Marshall 1983:47-51; Reichmann 1980:22-61) Many specifically Iranian texts have had considerable influence well beyond Iran. The book of Leviticus in the Old Testament testifies to influence of earlier Zoroastrian ritual purity writings and practices which had been codified in writing, and later selectively translated into Hebrew (during the Babylonian Exile).
Also, from very early in Iranian history, written materials were found to be in a very complex relation to spoken discourse. In the Indo-European tradition, there has long been a tension between the authority of things spoken to things written, as evidenced by the long lag in writing down such sacred writings as the Vedas in India, as well as much Avestan material in Iran until after much other more mundane writings had been committed to script. The Sandhi system of transcribing Sanskrit in accordance to how it would be spoken demonstrates that it was spoken, and not written Sanskrit that was dev nagari, the language of the gods. In Sasanian times, the Zoroastrian mobads, or high priests, were famed for the vast amount of sacred material they had memorized (cf. Boyce 1979:126-138), and to this day, Parsi priests (and not long ago all Parsi males) are expected to memorize and be able to orally recite the entirety of the Gathas, the original 'text' of Zoroaster, and the oldest portion of the Avesta.
In Islam, which displaced Zoroastrianism, authority resides with the book, the Qur'an. The Qur'an and not the Prophet is the ultimate source of revelation, the Kalam Allah, the word of God. For Christianity it does not seem particularly important that Jesus would have spoken Aramaic, nor that the New Testament was composed in demotic Greek. Such facts are blithely forgotten in common Christian parlance. The final extreme to this tendency, so the perhaps apocryphal story goes, occurs when a fundamentalist Christian mother living in the American southwest was informed that her son should learn another language in school. She replied, "If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for him." The Bible, her font of truth, and to which her minister referred with his beating hand, was clearly written in English.