Community High School Tehran, Iran

The Community High School was originally founded as a boarding school for the children of Presbyterian missionaries from the United States who were stationed in Iran since the 1830s. In the late 1940s, the school moved from its location at Ghavam Saltaneh Street to its most famous location on Kucheh Marizkhaneh (Hospital Drive) near Jaleh Street until the summer of 1979 when it was permanently shut down by the new Islamic government. The new campus had been an old Presbyterian missionary hospital during WWII where Farah Diba, the Queen of Iran, was born. After the war, it was eventually returned to the missionaries to be used as the school campus and J. Richard Irvine was hired as its headmaster in 1951. The large, shady compound had several buildings, a small church, walking paths and a little pond teeming with tadpoles.

HISTORY

The Presbyterian missionary school established itself gradually in the early 1900s in Hamadan, Western Persia (as it was known by the West then), growing from a "home school" into a formal school, one teacher at a time. In the 1930s the school moved to Tehran due to logistical considerations, located on Gravamen Sultan eh Street and had slightly more than 200 students. By the 1950s only a few of the students were children of missionaries as the number of Iranians and foreign students increased. It was commonly called the "American School", because students were taught primarily in English, with French and Persian as secondary languages. Classes met Monday through Thursday and on Saturdays. With the exception of some of the Americans, most of the students spoke two or more languages.

The expatriate population of Persia in the early 1900s, in the reign of Ahmad Shah Qajar, was very small and consisted mainly of British interested in the execution of the business of their colonial empire. Some of the expatriate population included Swedish officers of the early Persian Gendarmerie, and Russian officers of Cossack brigades which largely made up the Iranian military. It was from just such a Cossack brigade that Reza Shah came to prominence. American presence in Persia was relatively small at that time, and consisted largely of missionaries. The Presbyterian missionaries had a delicate relationship with the Persian government, which found it easier to appease irritation in the Islamic establishment by restricting Christian religious activities at the school.

NEW CAMPUS

Campus 1970's - Steve Davenport '72

After the accession to power of Reza Shah, the influence and presence of Britain and Russia increased in Iran despite the pro-axis leanings of the Shah who refused the Allies use of the trans-Iranian railroad. He was consequently deposed and exiled to South Africa in favor of his son in 1941, three months after the launch of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The American Army's Persian Gulf Command used Iran as a conduit for materiel to the Soviet Union, other routes being far more hazardous. By 1945, 150,000 assembled trucks, jeeps, aircraft, and even fire engines were transhipped from Khorramshar through Qazvin by truck and Tehran by train and then north to the Soviet Union¹. In 1943, the Allies met for the Tehran Conference as a measure of its importance to the Allied war effort. During the war, the Presbyterian missionary hospital, later to become the Community School campus, was taken over for use as a military hospital. After the war, increasing United States involvement with Iran meant more Americans in Iran, and the Community School was the only school in town for their children's education.

General Norman Schwarzkopf, famous for his role in the Gulf War, was a student at Community School in 1950 and 1951 with his two sisters Sally and Ruth Ann. His father, formerly the Commandant of the New Jersey Highway Patrol, was brought in during the early years of the Truman Point-Four program to organize the Iranian Gendarmerie. Schwartzkopf's autobiographical account of life as a boy in Iran is fascinating (opinion). It includes Arabian Nightsesque stories of nomads, tents, camels and palaces, many things which had largely vanished by the late 1960s.

President Truman's Point-Four program put a heavy strain on Community School because it brought many more American students. It also brought Iran closer to the US politically, and marked the beginning of a period of economic growth; many Iranians were stimulated to seek a western education for their children.

GROWING PAINS

THE BLUE GATE - Photo 2005 by Cameron Ostovar'76

In 1967 there was some tension in the school; the school population was about half Iranian and mostly non-Christian. Although the school atmosphere was very open and tolerant, the Presbyterian missionary board thought the school was straying from its charter. By this time Mr. Irvine and board member Dr. Khodadad Farmanfarmaian had come to the view that Community should be developed into an International school, and should take on the role of secular college preparatory school. They formed an ad hoc committee to explore this possibility. Clearly, the missionary board thought Mr. Irvine and Dr. Farmanfarmaian were leading the school away from its missionary charter, and emotions flared up.

The need for international schools in Iran was certainly strong, and was a natural source of conflict and turmoil for the board. At that time, chapel was voluntary, bible class was required. The school was very open and tolerant. The missionaries were unhappy though: The school had largely become a school for upper-class Iranian children. The missionary board reacted negatively to the ad hoc committee promoting an International school. Quickly, over the summer of 1967, the Iranzamin School was formed by Mr. Irvine and Dr. Farmanfarmaian, and Mr. Irvine left Community School to become its headmaster. This parting of ways caused many hurt feelings, and many of the people involved bore strong grudges lasting years. Ms. Sahakian, a school icon, went to Iranzamin School; Ms. Amin, another school icon, stayed at Community School.

After the departure of Mr. Irvine, the missionary board hired Douglas Hill as the next headmaster. Given the natural problems of running a religious school in Iran, including government objections and interference, it might not be surprising that Mr. Hill also ended up moving the school in the direction of a secular international school. Enrollment steadily increased as the US military personnel arrived in Tehran and a few sent their children to Community School. as did businessmen and diplomats. Eventually Tehran American School (TAS) was established by the US Army for the many dependents in Tehran of U.S. military personnel. At its peak, the American population in Iran was 70,000 ( ? ) during the 1970s. (Information courtesy of Richard Irvine and Frizie Riahi)

SCHOOL SPIRIT

I pledge allegiance to my country, and to the United Nations of which it is a part, one world brotherhood of peaceful nations, with liberty and justice for all.

The United Nations Pledge

Someone once called the Community School "a laboratory of democracy at work." Besides the Americans, there were many students from prominent Iranian families and children from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, whose families were living temporarily in Tehran. Their parents were diplomats, exiles, military, professionals, oil industry personnel, etc. CHS represented 28 nationalities and eight religions, yet everyone studied and played well together, barely aware of the differences between one another or of the tensions among many of their homelands. Christians, Jews, Moslems, Zoroastrians, and Sikh blended without a problem. Above the school entrance, in beautiful Persian calligraphy, were the words from the Book of John, 8:32, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Some students learned the United Nations pledge of allegiance to the individual countries and flags and sang the United Nations hymn, the "Song of Peace," set to music by the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius.

The school facilities on the new campus were a big improvement, but there was a downside. It was located at the end of a dead-end street in a dangerous part of the city where unrest and riots were particularly common during the late 1970s. The class of 1979 was the last and final class to hold a graduation ceremony on the main campus in June of that year, after which its doors were closed forever.

LETTER FROM RICHARD IRVINE, HEADMASTER 1951-1967

Thank you all for so many heartfelt messages, for such warmly satisfying greetings on Fathers Day and for such a cheerful welcome to our newest great grandson, Baden Matthew Irvine. I cherish my own family with special appreciation and love, and to know that I enjoy such a wonderful extended family is truly a treasure. I promised to give you some information about the history of the Iranzamin School and I'm happy at long last to send this preliminary and inevitably incomplete narrative.

Although Iranzamin appeared on the scene in 1967, its beginnings go a long way back in time. Its forbears include Dr. Rezazadeh Shafagh who ranks high among Iranzamin's founders. He played a significant role in Iranzamin's origins which go back to 1835 when New Englanders, Charlotte and Justin Perkins, under the auspices of Boston's Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, arrived in Persia. The Boston Commissioners hoped to encourage and reinvigorate the ancient indigenous Iranian Nestorian Church at a time when a poverty stricken, largely unschooled populace was experiencing the negative political, social and economic effects of the "great game" between Britain and Russia for, among other things, dominance of Persia; an era characterized by Royal grants like the tobacco concession to an Englishman, the customs concession to the Belgians and the deplorable occasion when a British military escort conducted Iran's Crown Prince to Tehran for his coronation.

In Urmia Mr.and Mrs.Perkins opened a school, a clinic, a church, and a printing press; founding the American Presbyterian Mission in Iran. It is fascinating to think that the pioneering American school in Iran, the first modern elementary school in the country, lacking all facilities, used a sandbox in place of a blackboard for teaching the basics.

Subsequently the American Presbyterian Mission established mission stations with clinics, hospitals, churches and schools in many Iranian towns and cities including Tehran and Tabriz. Rezazadeh Shafagh was a student in the Mission School in Tabriz. Shafagh and Howard Baskerville, one of his American teachers, joined the ranks of those supporting Iran's Constitutional Movement of 1905-1911. Baskerville was killed fighting for the Constitution, dying on the battlefield in Shafagh's arms. Dr. Shafagh became a highly regarded scholar, was Iran's Representative to the Founding of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, and was one of those who founded Tehran University. He was a frequent speaker at Community School and was a founding faculty member of the Iranzamin College of Business and Library Science.

The Mission School in Tehran became Alborz College whose founder, Dr. Samuel Martin Jordan, speaking of his school, intended to "adapt the best Western methods to the needs of the country" and "retain all that is good in their own civilization." The curriculum was that of American schools of the time with Persian the language of instruction. Dr. and Mrs. Mrs. Jordan's students included the children of many prominent Iranian families. Having served in Iran from 1898 until retirement in 1941, Dr. Jordan was warmly eulogized in 1952 in public ceremonies on the Alborz College campus cogently honoring him for his service to Iran. Dr. Ali Asghar Hekmat, Dr. Abol Ghassem Bakhtiar and Dr. Jahanshah Saleh were among many celebrating Jordan's life and his contribution to Iranian education.

During the 1930s Reza Shah's Ministry of Education established a national Iranian education system on the French model. With the establishment of government schools mission schools were closed or became parochial schools and foreign schools in Iran were closed, including Alborz College which was chartered in New York State. The College was purchased by the Iranian government in 1940.

Community School, organized in Hamadan in the 1930s for grades one through ten (We added the junior and senior years in 1952) gathered together in community the previously homeschooled children of the American Presbyterian Mission and welcomed the children of other foreign nationals to this new school for "children of many lands". With the guidance of Sarah McDowell, whose husband directed the American Mission hospital in Tehran, Community School moved to Tehran and, because it provided education for the children of foreigners, it was not closed by the government. Sarah McDowell stated the objective of the school as "helping the individual student to find his or her place in our turbulent world and to fill him with a sense of responsibility, an understanding of peoples who come from many cultural backgrounds, and a conviction that life has purpose and meaning". Commodore Fisher, Community School's loved and admired Principal who retired in 1950, considered that Community School was a "Little United Nations". I was appointed to succeed Com Fisher. Mary Ann and I arrived in Tehran in the summer of 1951. At that time Iranian families were permitted to enroll their children in the Community School with written authorization by the Ministry of Education. However, such authorization did not carry Iran's official Secondary School Diploma so that Community School graduates who earned university degrees abroad were considered legally illiterate in Iran.

Many parents who had attended Alborz College enrolled their children in Community School. By the 1960s (concurrently, as it happened, with schools in Europe and the United States) we had developed at Community School a curriculum for grades nursery through twelve which in time became the International Baccalaureate. Dr. Khodadad Farmanfarmaian strongly supported International Baccalaureate development and encouraged parental interest in giving official standing to Community School's Diploma. During the 1966-1967 school year Iran's High Council of Education proposed licensing the Community School Committee, which would have made Community School's Diploma valid in Iran. Also, Community School was offered a 99 year government land grant for a new campus. In view of the earlier closure of foreign schools, neither proposal was accepted by the American Presbyterian Mission and a decision was made that I would be transferred to a school in Alexandria, Egypt. At about the same time Iran's High Council of Education adopted the International Bacalaureate for a new school, proposing to license me as Headmaster. This was an unprecedented opportunity to acknowledge the High Council's legitimization of more than a century of Presbyterian education in Iran, to appreciate Iran's increasing interest in the American model for Iranian public education, and for me to accept an official invitation to continue what I had been doing since 1951. With profound regret at breaking with the remarkable, collegial companionship of the American Presbyterian Mission and the Community School, where I had spent many happy and rewarding years, I accepted the Ministry of Education emtiaz, resigned from the American Presbyterian Mission and opened the Tehran International School in the summer of 1967. My decision found support in the Persian Evangelical Church in Tehran, of which Mary Ann and I were members, and our relationship with the church continued.

This new school required a name, a curriculum, a faculty, a campus, financial support, and a clientele.

The name "Iranzamin" was the felicitous counsel of Deputy Minister of Education, Dr. Sharifi, who consulted with me about the wording of the emtiaz for the school.

The International Baccalaureate Office in Geneva, Switzerland, planned the academic year 1967-1968 to be an experimental year for the Diploma. Having pioneered the curriculum, (laying the foundation for what became the Iranzamin School), the Community School Committee was invited to participate in this experimental year. The Community School Committee decided not to participate. Iranzamin, having been licensed for the International Baccalaureate by Iran's High Council of Education, was made a founding participant in the International Baccalaureate. Other founding IB schools were the Geneva International School, Atlantic College in Wales, the United Nations International School in New York, the Lycee International de St. Germaine in France and the Goethe Gymnasium in Germany. The International Baccalaureate curriculum, culminating in a set of examinations, qualified successful secondary school graduates for admission to colleges and universities wherever they wished to study, including higher education in Iran.

Nearly thirty of my erstwhile Community School colleagues joined me in this unprecedented opportunity, filling most teaching positions for the new school. Tehran's cosmopolitan populace provided able recruits for teaching positions. In subsequent years Cultural Organizations like the Goethe Institute, College and University placement offices, and agencies like International Schools Services of Princeton, New Jersey, offered candidates from both Eastern and Western Europe as well as the United States.

The rental of a pleasant town house on Khiabani Simetri, opposite the Gendarmerie Headquarters just south of Tehran University, provided a suitable campus where a resourceful and dedicated faculty was able to guide a delightfully harmonious community of youthful scholars.

A number of individuals and groups proposed financial backing for Iranzamin as a proprietary school, expressing with Dr. Abol Hassan Ebtehaj the generally accepted view that schools should make a financial return on investment. To the contrary, it was intended that Iranzamin would be a not-for-profit school. Dr. Farmanfarmaian and I invited people to provide promissory notes as collateral for a line of credit with the Bank of Iran and the Middle East. Forty business and professional men made softehs over to me in support of this line of credit.

Over the summer of 1967 Iranian and expatriate families enrolled about two hundred boys and girls composing one class at each grade level ranging from Nursery through Grade Twelve. Fifteen students established the Senior Class, mastered the IB examinations, and graduated in June of 1968 holding fifteen of the world's first International Baccalaureate Diplomas. Their achievement, with that of the graduates of the other founding IB schools, confirmed the official acceptance of the IB by colleges, universities and ministries of education across much of the world, including Iran.

A Ministry of Education license placed every aspect of a school's life in the headmaster's hands. Resolved to administer the school under the aegis of a Board of Trustees (although there was no legal precedent for incorporating an Iranian school on the model of American private schools like the Deerfield Academy, the Choate School and the Philips Exeter Academy) I arranged to incorporate the Iranzamin School in Iranian law with articles of incorporation similar to those of the Choate School in Connecticut. With the Prime Minister as our Honorary Chair, and Dr. Khodadad Farmanfarmaian as our first Chairman of the Board, Dr. Ahmad Ahmadi, Mrs. A. A. Batai, Mr. J. Richard Irvine, Dr. Abol Majid Majidi, Dr. A. Majidian, Dr. Reza Moghadam, Mr. George Ovanessoff, Dr. N. Raeen, Dr. Majid Rahnema, Mrs. Julia Samii, and Dr. Iraj Vahidi pursued a course which strengthened the school and led to the construction of Iranzamin's new campus on Ministry of Court property in the North of the city. . The vision and example of men like Justin Perkins, Howard Baskerville, Rezazadeh Shafagh, and Samuel Jordan, Alborz alumni enterprise, Sarah McDowell's conception of purpose and community, Commodore Fisher's affinity for the United Nations, Khodadad Farmanfarmaian's dedicated enthusiasm, the unstinting service of Iranzamin's Board of Trustees and the High Council of Education's discerning view of the future brought to fruition Dr. Jordan's intention to bring the "best Western methods to the needs of the country" while "retaining all that is good in their own civilization".

Although revitalizing the ancient Iranian Nestorian Church had been the Mission's primary motivation, that effort brought into being a vital Persian Evangelical Church with a number of schools under the aegis of the Ministry of Education, and produced Alborz College for men, Sage College for women, and the Community and Iranzamin Schools where boys and girls from nearly every cultural and religious tradition studied together in harmonious mutual esteem; bequeathing to us a marvelous family which truly celebrates genuine community amidst the world's diversity.

This cherished experience is now overshadowed by a competing claim for hearts and minds. Community and Iranzamin metamorphosed, in what is perhaps best described as a Kafkaesque manner, into traditional doctrinaire schools. Community School was occupied, its people and program displaced, and its library arbitrarily dismembered. Iranzamin's status with the International Baccalaureate was allowed to lapse, and its library was burned in the school courtyard. Both schools continued to function for some time, until, as with the Cheshire Cat in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", the form slowly disappeared until only your delightful smiles remained.

It is an extraordinarily remarkable blessing to have enjoyed a share in this venture and to enjoy now the affectionate familial friendship of men and women I first knew as my students at the Community and Iranzamin Schools. My Community School predecessor, Commodore Fisher, had it right when he observed that it has been you, the students, who transformed what might have been ordinary schooling into an affectionate and loving community. All of which brings engagingly to mind Saadi's memorable words, "Children of Adam are all members of the same body..." and Shakespeare's "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin".

Looking back over this odyssey, I am astonished at the ways of Providence which picked up two school teachers from New Jersey -- my wife Mary Ann and myself -- set them down in a strange land, and made that land their home.

With many good wishes for these summer days and with warm affection and love,

Richard Irvine . August 8, 2008

THE RISE AND FALL OF TEHRAN'S COMMUNITY SCHOOL

By: Victor Dabby, Alumni September 24, 2006

The history of the Community School parallels America's long love/hate relationship with Iran.

It started in the 19th century when scores of U.S. Presbyterian missionaries descend on the country to preach the message of the New Testament. With them came their children and a need for schools.

It began with home schooling in 1830s and ended with a sprawling campus in Tehran in the 1950s. At first, the school had modest facilities in the Iranian capital in the 1930s with about 200 students. Then came more classrooms and teachers.

By the 1950s, the school changed forever as non-Americans - Iranian and foreigners living in Iran - outnumbered the kids of missionaries for whom the school was first set up. Among the people of Tehran, it was known as the "American school."

Its administrators walked a tight line between proselytizing Christianity and a broad secular identity that respects students who are Muslim, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Hindu or Sikh.

It also tried not to offend Iran's powerful Islamic clergy by holding classes from Monday to Thursday, closing on Friday (the Muslim sabbath) and reopening on Saturday.

This made for odd, split weekends, but everyone was happy. The teaching of French made many of the non-American students bilingual or trilingual or even quadrilingual.

The end of the Second World War brought a new wave of Americans working for the oil industry, multi-nationals or the military. By the 1970s, about 70,000 Americans lived and work in Iran.

Their children flocked to the school. Early students include Norman Schwarzkopf, who went on to lead U.S. forces in the first Gulf War. Also a student was Bob Barr, the Republican congressman from Georgia. Diane Kerry, sister of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, taught at the school for several years.

Meantime, a prospering Iranian middle class joined the race for Western-style education, looking to Community School, which, by the 1950s, had expanded to a sprawling new campus on Kucheh Marizkhaneh (Hospital Drive) in southeast Tehran.

Several city blocks long, the grounds included large buildings, pathways, gardens, soccer and basketball courts, as well as a pond. During the Second World War, it was a Presbyterian missionary hospital but changed vocations soon after.

A dynamic American educator, J. Richard Irvine, became headmaster and the school took off. By the mid-1960s, Community School was half-Iranian and majority non-Christian. It took in many children of Iraqi Jewish families - like my own - who were refugees from the turmoil of Baghdad in the 1940s.

But the administration split over the school's future and the role of religion. Irvine left to start his own international school with a secular bent.

Both schools prospered but everything came to a stop with the triumph of the Islamic Revolution.

The schools were closed by the new government in 1979. Ironically, one of Irvine's last students was the articulate Massoumeh Ebtekar, who ended up speaking English so well that she became a sought-after spokesperson for the hostage-takers who occupied the U.S. embassy in Tehran - another twist in our long story.

Notable alumni

• Bob Barr - Former United States House of Representatives, Georgia 1995-2003
• Yasmine Pahlavi - Wife of Prince Reza Pahlavi

• Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. - U.S. Retired General, Gulf War 1990-1991
• Tchenguiz brothers - Investment Bankers
• Terence Ward - Author of "Searching for Hassan: An American Family's Journey Home to Iran"
• Henry Dallal - Professional photographer, Books:"Horse Warriors" and "Pageantry & Performance"