1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

When I was in Iran, the Peace Corps had put in place a very large program. It was a good
one. It worked in the villages, on education, health and water supply. The Peace Corps
had a very big group that worked on teaching in the villages. Literacy corps activity, by
the Iranians and other village work by the Peace Corps made it possible to extend
education to villages where it was not possible before. It should be noted that in almost
all villages of Iran no matter how remote, there was a mullah. He would teach at the
village school – called maktabs – for three grades. They taught the Koran, the great
Persian poets, and used whatever literary materials were available. The idea of village
education was something that was built into the Iranian system. What the modern world
brought, with the shah’s so-called literacy corps and programs like the American Peace
Corps, accompanying that, which were much smaller in number of course compared to
the tens of thousands of teaching mullahs, was a new dimension. The literacy corps and
the Peace Corps teachers extended and modernized, meaning secularized, what had been
a traditional form of basic literacy that had a strong religious content. As I think about it
now, the roots of religious life throughout the country really was reflected in the role of
the mullah in the village. The mullah performed marriages. He taught. He buried the
dead. The mullahs were a key part of the social structure of villages and cities that had
existed for a very long time. I suppose if one did careful research you could go back
before Islam and you would have found that Zoroastrian priests carried out these
necessary social functions.
Q: Under the shah’s regime, were they able to tap a resource to bring about further
education of having young, educated Iranians going out to the people, sort of like
Narodniki? I mean, of that type?
MILLER: Well, that was the way the literacy corps performed. That was characteristic of
the most successful programs. The literacy corps was a program whereby young Iranian
university graduates, and high school graduates, went out to the villages and taught. In
other words, those who were going into education as a profession in the Ministry of
Education – that was the sole employer of teachers, and a handful of very few private
schools – they went out into the villages as part of their training. Just as our doctors here
under the medical student support programs the Congress has mandated, are given free
education for medical training, then the doctors were obligated to serve for several years
in public health. So the Iranian student teachers went out to the villages as secular,
modernizing missionaries.
Most of the teachers were urban, from the big cities. They had never really experienced or
seen real life in the villages. They became socialized when they saw, at first hand,
realities of Iran. Many of the literacy corps became revolutionaries later. They saw the
needs of the country first hand. It was part of the process of what we could call, Iran’s
democratization. The country was meeting itself on its own terms and seeing what its
needs were and responding. The literacy corps, the medical corps, those infrastructure
kinds of approaches that were in the so-called White Revolution but were also planned
for in the Plan Organization objectives of the time of what was needed for Iran to become
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