Reforms of 1966-78. In the 1950s and 1960s Persian educational planners and their American advisers considered vocational training the principal weakness in the educational structure (Hendershot, pp. 16, 153-97; Baldwin, pp. 155-56). The main obstacle was the attitudes of students and their parents toward manual work: “When a student was given an assignment to cultivate some ground, his family sent a laborer to do the work. To demonstrate the use of shop equipment, mechanics were used while the teacher and students merely observed. The graduates of agricultural high schools and the agricultural college expected to be not farmers, but desk officers in the Ministry of Agriculture”