The Old School

Sadriddin Ayni's account of the old-style maktab, told from the inside. The schoolroom was nothing like the house he came from — not wide, not light, not quiet, but one cramped room with two doors, one of them blocked up through the cold months and the other a slit of a window the schoolmaster had papered over and rubbed with linseed oil against the rain. The paper had taken up so much street dust that it had gone black as a pot-holder, and almost no light came through it. Text in Dari/Persian.

Author: صدرالدین عینی

Original title: مکتب کهنه