Sixty-Three Scholarships: The Persian-American Educational Society

In Issue 1 of Volume 2 of the *Star of the West,* dated March 1911, the editors gave a full column to the work of the Persian-American Educational Society — a small American Bahá'í body, headquartered in Washington, D.C., whose particular mission was to support the Bahá'í-affiliated educational institutions then operating in Persia.

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The Society's report was brief but encouraging. Sixty-three scholarships had been *enrolled* — meaning that sixty-three American believers had each taken on personal responsibility for the schooling fees of one Persian student for one year. Seven hundred dollars in cash had been remitted to Tehran to support the work of the Tarbíyat schools.

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The sums sound small in retrospect. In 1911 they were not. Seven hundred dollars represented several years' wages for the average American working family. The sixty-three scholarship donors had, in many cases, made real personal sacrifices — sending the money for a Persian schoolchild while their own families counted dollars for groceries.

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The article also printed a Tablet from 'Abdu'l-Bahá to the Society. The request was specific.

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> One soon, from among the American Bahais, who is efficient in > science and arts.

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The Master was asking the American friends, alongside the financial support, to send a *person.* Specifically, He was asking for an American teacher with practical training in modern science and the practical arts who would relocate to Tehran and join the staff of the Tarbíyat school for boys. The Persian curriculum had begun, in those years, to include the modern subjects — physics, chemistry, mathematics, drawing, geography — that the older Persian educational system had not covered.

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American teachers, in 1911, were among the few trained practitioners available who could combine the technical competence with the spiritual sympathy the Master required.

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The request would in due course be answered. Other Americans followed Dr. Susan Moody to Tehran in the years before the Great War. Some taught at Tarbíyat. Others worked in the hospitals. Others worked alongside the Persian Bahá'í community in social and educational service of various kinds. The Persian-American Educational Society itself, never large, continued through the 1910s and 1920s as the small institutional spine of that exchange.

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The *Star of the West* article was the kind of small piece the magazine's editors quietly believed in. The friends in America were being told, in plain language, what the Master was asking of them. Sixty-three scholarships. Seven hundred dollars. *One, soon, who is efficient in science and arts.* Each of those was a deliverable. Each, in its way, was delivered. The long century of American-Persian Bahá'í cooperation was being built, in 1911, from the small numerical reports of a Society now largely forgotten.

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