Abstract
Acquiring knowledge has always been one of the key matters of man's life. The concept of education, in a broad sense, can contain all those things that one learns during his lifetime and it most likely begins from the time of birth. Putting that aside, there comes a point when a person seeks to acquire some kind of knowledge for a certain purpose. Based on the kind of that knowledge (explicit or implicit), education can be categorized into two types: formal and informal. The former is standardized, based on texts or a specific curriculum, and the latter non-specific, taught during action and usually for the intention of learning a skill. No matter what type, education requires a social institution and soon after, a physical place. and so, some of the educational institutions gained identifiable forms of architecture like schools along the way.
In this paper we will take a closer look to the transformation of the concept of education and its specific architecture in Iran's Qajar period, a critical time in Iran's history when the country is on the verge of a great change resulting from the encounter with modern world. While informal education hardly kept its existence, formal education underwent two main social processes of change: first resulting from Abbas Mirza's ideas, which was focused on improving adult education and caused the foundation of Dar-al-fonon. Second resulting from the efforts of a group of educational reformists called Anjoman Maref which was focused on children's primary education and was one of the first steps towards public education. All of these changes altered the educational institution system and rose against the traditional world of Maktabkhaneh and the exclusiveness of advanced education. They caused a kind of evolution in the nature of educational institution and prepared a proper context for the advent of new forms of architecture.
By:Samaneh Mohseni; Saba madani & Dena Shamsizadeh