This is a critical evaluation of roles and relationships among education, the state, modernity and cultural exchange in the Third World, using Iran during the Pahlavi period (1925-1979) as a case study. The point of departure is an analysis of the functionalist theory of education, in which education appears as a rather non-problematic and non-contradictory institution helping to modernize the world. A study of the state apparatus in the Third World showed that the state usually acquires legitimacy through communicative-educational means. In the case of Iran, a continual postponement of the arrival of democracy was legitimized by the alleged need to wait for the attainment of full literacy. But while serving the existing state in this way, education was simultaneously undermining it through various channels; these include thrusting new classes into the political arena, exposing the newly educated to legal-rational ideologies, and placing youth in educational institutions in which they collectively experienced the arbitrary rule of the state. Thus the creation of an oppositional intelligentsia was bound inextricably to the expanion of schools. Moreover, the expansion of schools was not accompanied by educational development, but was accompanied by a decline in the quantity and quality of publications and curtailment of the press. Education as an institution, and the popular means of communication both suffered from an exhaustion of meaning and a degeneration of discourse. This process as well as an abrupt breach of national/traditional praxis resulted in a loosening of the grip of the cultural apparatus of the state and a protracted cultural crisis which then permitted the return of the Iranian clerics as traditional communicators and counter hegemonic ideologues. The Islamic Revolution of 1977-1979 was a revitalization movement with messianic overtones and the fiscal crisis of 1976 acted only as a catalyst for that movement. / Finally, after defining the contradictory role of education in Iran as a Third World country, the concept of modernity was critically analyzed as ethnocentric and ahistorical. For the improvement of future educational-communicative practices, it was argued that the policy makers of the Third World need to pay closer attention to their national/traditional cultures, and to reevaluate the nature of cultural exchange with hegemonic powers. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 47-12, Section: A, page: 4352. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1986.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_75983 |
| Contributors | NAFISI, ABDOL RASOOL., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 190 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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