Training Historian or History Teacher: Dispatching History and Geography Students to Europe (1928-1933 A.D.): Motivations, Mechanisms and Achievements

Dispatching the students to Europe had begun after the Iran-Russia wars by the aim of modernizing and compensating for hindrance. This process continued during the Qajar period; According to documents, nearly a thousand students in this era were dispatched to Europe aiming at transferring knowledge. One of the main incentives for dispatching agents was to reconstruction and evolution of the education system. But according to the documents no student in “History Course” was dispatched in the mentioned era. In the first decade of Pahlavi era by codifying the bill of dispatching students in sixth national consultative assembly, we witness creating new generation of dispatching students in the interval of 1928-1933 A.D.) who constitute the new modernizing generation of Iran among which the fist history course students were included. Albeit as it is being demonstrated in the article, new wave of dispatching students in history course did not lead to training a historian or an evolution in historical research. In order to understand mentioned phenomenon, after an overview of the process of dispatching students in general and dispatching students in the field of history in particular, the article will discuss the mechanisms of history student dispatching, dispatched persons and their takeaways based on sources and documents. Moreover, there are some main variables to understand the problem of sending students not becoming professional historians in the decades of sending Iranian students among which these issues have been recognized: the motivations and goals of sending designers and agents, the government's expectations and demands from graduates for their future careers in the process of modernization, the French educational system as the destination of 75% of sending students and the gap between research and education in this country.