Transforming Dangerous Nomads into Useful Artisans, Technicians, Agriculturists: Education in the Reza Shah Period

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 eighteenth-century Russia or those of Muhammad ‘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 late nineteenth century.