Romantic Pedigree of Pahlavi the First’ Nationalism Discourse and National Identity Education in Primary Textbooks

As a modern autocracy, Reza Shah's government adopted a romantic authoritarian nationalist discourse that was rooted in the ideas of German thinkers such as Fichte and Herder as its paradigm for establishing Iranian national identity. This discourse insisted on the "national characteristics" and imagined the nation based on "romanticism" as an eternal phenomenon and national history was considered to be the essence of national identity. Therefore, in order to create intellectual infrastructure of society for transcending its own national identity, Pahlavi the First focused on the teaching of national history more than ever before, thus emphasizing on the unified identity of all Iranians. Meanwhile, teaching national history to children made it possible to achieve this goal as quickly and efficiently as possible. The main question in this article is how Reza Shah's rule institutionalized the concept of Iranian national identity through teaching history to children. In response to this question, the main hypothesis of this study is that the modern autocracy sought to institutionalize the concept of Iranian national identity among the new generation of the Iranian nation, based on romantic authoritarian nationalism and its application for reading national history in elementary textbooks.