A PERSIAN SCHOOLGhulam Husain never spills his ink. Each boy has his own inkpot, which contains a tangled piece of silk soaked in ink. It dries up between the lessons, so when Ghulam Husain wants to write he moistens it with water so that the silk is thoroughly wet, but there is no water lying in the inkpot. In among this wet silk he dips his pen.

If you look into Ghulam Husain’s pen-box you will find pens cut to various breadths for large or small writing, a penknife, and a little slab to rest the pen-point on for the final cut; an inkpot, and a tiny brass ladle for adding water.

Many an English boy finds it tiresome to have to dot his i’s, but little Ghulam Husain has to dot almost every letter, some above the line and some below, some with one dot, some with two, and some with three. These dots are not round, but square, and the height of the letters is measured by the size of the dots. This letter must be one dot high, that letter two dots high, another three, and yet another five dots high. The size of the dot itself depends on the breadth of the pen.

As he learns to write better he will run his letters into curious combinations, and group his dots picturesquely in parts of the word to which they do not belong, or leave them out altogether, until at last, when he can write a really beautiful hand, the schoolmaster himself will not be able to read the letter without careful study, and may even have to guess at the meaning of particularly well-written passages.

One great beauty of a Persian letter is the way each line runs up at the end, making a pile of words, syllables, and even single letters, something in this style:—

The Persians do not apparently think much of their own system of education, for they are always laughing at their schoolmasters.

They have a story of a charvadar, or muleteer, one of whose mules strayed one day into a school. It was quickly driven out, and the muleteer claimed damages from the schoolmaster to the extent of half the value of the mule. The schoolmaster indignantly asked on what he based his claim. The muleteer turned to the crowd which had gathered to listen to the argument. “My beast,” said he, “went into his school a mule and it has come out a donkey.” You see a donkey counts half a mule in caravan travelling, just as a child counts half a person in train travelling.

The punishments are as topsy-turvy as the lessons. When a boy is caned he lies on his back and holds out his feet instead of his hands. Sometimes his feet are held in a kind of stocks while he is caned across the soles. They call it “eating sticks” or “eating wood”—the words are the same.

Some missionaries were picnicking one day in an orchard in a hill village, and the village children gathered round to watch the foreigners’ strange ways. “Do you often come and eat plums here?” one of the ladies asked; and she was greatly bewildered by the curious tastes of Persian boys, when the owner of the orchard answered for them, that the boys who came into his orchard ate not the plums but the wood.

This beating on the soles of the feet is a common punishment for every one, from the slave and the schoolboy to the criminal and the political offender. With schoolboys it is of course not very severe, but in more serious cases it may be very severe indeed, even resulting in death. The culprit in these cases is ordered not so many blows but so many sticks, i.e. he is to be beaten till so many sticks have been broken. A hundred sticks is not an uncommon punishment. If the culprit is rich enough he may bribe the farrashes to strike the stocks when possible and so break the sticks quickly, and not over his feet; but a poor man has to take his punishment.

There is no compulsory education in Persia and very little free education. There was one man who tried to atone for sins, which he made no pretence of giving up, by founding a large free school in one Persian town, but it is not a common form of benevolence. So it is only those who can spare a little money who send their boys to school, and a great many never get beyond a very early stage of reading and writing.

As for the girls very few parents care to waste their money over their girls’ education. A certain number are taught to read the Quran, a less number go on to reading such books as they have studied, but very few can read at sight, and writing is even rarer. Still in the matter of the education of girls Persia is in advance of other Muhammadan countries.

In these days of general education it is difficult for us to realise in this country how hard it is for the missionaries to teach the gospel truths to the Persians. There is so much to be taught and there are so many to be taught, and when it has to be done orally to people whose intelligence and memory have never been developed by study of any kind, whose minds and brains have never grown up properly, and who forget so easily, it means an amount of work that would take up all the time and strength of far more missionaries than are now in the field.

Many of the converts cannot come regularly for oral teaching, and they are liable at any time to move out of the missionaries’ reach, so the missionaries try to teach all the converts and their children to read their Bibles at any rate, so that they can get teaching direct from God’s Word themselves.

Besides the Persian schools there are now several Christian schools in Persia, but we will talk about those in the next chapter. Since they were started there has been an attempt in some of the big towns to introduce an improved system of teaching, and Persian reading-books are now printed with ba-bi-bu, pa-pi-pu, etc. etc.; but this is the exceptional method of teaching, and not the rule in Persia, and I doubt if any orthodox schoolmaster would care to teach Persian before he taught the Arabic Quran.

The Parsees have a very good school in Yezd, largely supported by the Parsees in Bombay, but this is only for Parsee boys.