Among a body of teachers and pupils all in close contact with the desperate poverty of ordinary village life, it was not surprising that radical political ideas caught on. How strong these really were I do not know, but the government was alarmed. It first slowed down the growth of the Village Institutes, and then officially abolished their separate identity and merged them with the urban teachers' training colleges.
These Village Institutes were successful in rapidly producing a body of young men legally bound, able and in most cases willing to become village teachers. All the trained village teachers I knew, except the Travelling Headmaster resident in Elbashï, were products of these Institutes.
These young men had been taught that they were to act not merely as schoolmasters but as general missionaries of scientific enlightenment and progress. In fact they were far from adequately trained for such a task, and the social problems they faced would have daunted highly trained social workers. The point of the spartan regime and relatively remote position of the Village Institutes was to prevent the young men becoming irretrievably attached to urban life, and thus unwilling, even unable to settle back in the villages. But the result of this system was to teach them about a way of life very different from their own village upbringing, without giving them any first-hand experience of it. They were aware of ideals and values which made them despise the village, and yet had little realistic notion about urban life or about the possibilities of village reform, still less about Western society.
To the rest of Elbashï, the three young teachers were still members of the village belonging to familiar village households. Yet they had lost intimate contact through five years of almost continuous schooling. Their new ways and ideas and their pretensions created a social barrier between them and the village, and they symbolised to the village the hostile, outside urban world which had trained them and sent them back as its