The Tarbíyat Schools of Tihrán: News from Persia

In its issue dated the twenty-third of November 1911 the *Star of the West* carried a long report on the Tarbíyat Schools of Tihrán — the boys' school established in 1899 and the girls' school established by Susan Moody in 1909, both then operating under the patronage of the Bahá'í community of the Persian capital.

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The report, written by a correspondent in Tihrán, described the two schools' modest physical premises and their substantial educational ambition. The boys' school occupied a small courtyard building in the quarter near the bazaar; the girls' school had begun in a rented house in another quarter and was already in need of larger premises. Together the two schools served, by the time of the report, some four hundred pupils.

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The report stressed the schools' admissions policy — a policy that was, in the religious atmosphere of early-twentieth- century Persia, notable.

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> The school is open to every child, of every faith, and of > every station.

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The schools admitted Muslim, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Christian children alongside the children of the Bahá'í community. They admitted the children of merchants and the children of servants. They taught a modern curriculum: reading and writing in Persian and in French; arithmetic; geography; the natural sciences; for the boys, drawing and physical training; for the girls, the same intellectual subjects with the addition of domestic skills.

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The teachers were drawn from the most educated members of the Tihrán Bahá'í community. Many had been trained in the American or French missionary schools and brought their training back into a Bahá'í setting. The faculty included women — itself unusual in the Tihrán of 1911 — and the girls' school in particular was beginning to produce graduates who would carry the work of women's education forward into the next decades.

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The *Star of the West's* report named the schools' principals by name and gave the addresses of the offices in Tihrán so that American friends could write to them and could send small contributions. The American Bahá'í community in 1911 was proud of the Persian schools as one of the visible achievements of the Faith of the East. The schools would flourish for the next two decades.

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They would be forcibly closed by the Iranian government in 1934 as part of a wider campaign of suppression. The classrooms would be lost; the graduates and their work would not be. Many of the women who shaped the Iranian Bahá'í community of the next half century had passed through the Tarbíyat girls' school, whose founding the *Star of the West's* report of November 1911 had quietly celebrated.

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