This book is dedicated to my father, George Marzluf (1935–2017), and Odkhüü Nyamdorj (1959–2013), who introduced me to Mongolia. Your family and friends miss you both deeply.

Mongolian terms, personal names, and place names have been transliterated into the Latin alphabet according to the Tibetan-Himalayan Library (THL) scheme (“Transliteration Schemes” n.d.), which is one of several transliteration standards used commonly by scholars. The only variation from the THL scheme is that a “v” instead...

Written by the fourteen-year-old Biziyaa Pürev (Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia 2013) from his fifth-grade sc~hool dormitory in the vast Mongolian countryside, this following letter is remarkable in many ways:

In a scene from Galsan Navaannamjil’s Tales of an Old Secretary (2003, 780–81), two young men in the Autonomous Period discuss their educational possibilities, a debate that Navaannamjil restricts to whether the men hope to become literate in Mongolian or Tibetan. Navaannamjil, an inaugural member of the Group of Revolutionary Writers (Brown and Onon 1976, 386), whose...

A 1950 cartoon in Crocodile (Matar), the satirical newspaper produced by the same editors as Truth (Ünen) (Sanders 1987, 61), the Mongolian version of the Soviet Pravda and the main mouthpiece of the Revolutionary Party, depicts an older, traditionally dressed Mongolian man handing a book to a younger Mongolian dressed in worker’s overalls (see...

Expanding on the previous chapter, which examined the ways in which literacy was represented for the official purposes of the Revolutionary Party, this chapter describes and analyzes the specific ways in which literacy instruction and opportunities were provided to the Mongolian public by the “mature” socialist state, a period stretching from the late 1950s to the last...

In the previous three chapters, we encountered several explicit literacy sponsors, such as the centralized government and party institutions, Soviet international organizations, aimag or local levels of political power, and at the most local and personal level, teachers, librarians, propagandists, Pioneer leaders and head students, local party and collective administrators, and parents....

English instruction began formally in Mongolia when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs invited a British teacher, Mr. Weedon, at the end of 1914 to join several Buryat Russian teachers and teach in Niislel Khüree. Weedon had been teaching English in China and, more recently, in Irkutsk; unfortunately, beyond the terms of his contract and the fact that he was recognized by the Autonomous...

I began the narrative of Mongolian literacy in the twentieth century in the private, intimate domain of the pastoral Mongol ger, where (mostly) young male Mongolians learned how to read Mongol Bichig from fathers or older male relatives or family friends for a variety of personal, practical, or cultural reasons. In the second half of the twentieth century, as I suggested in...

Phillip P. Marzluf is an associate professor in the English Department at Kansas State University, where he teaches classes on literacy, professional writing, pedagogy, and World Literature. As a United States Peace Corps volunteer, he li~ved and worked in Sükhbaatar City, Selenge Aimag, from 1994 to 1996, and has been a “lifelong...

At the crossroads of Russia, China, and the Islamic world, Central Asia remains one of the world’s least-understood regions, despite being a significant theater for muscle-flexing by the great powers and regional players. This series, in conjunction with George Washington University’s Central Asia Program, offers insight into Central Asia by providing readers unique access to...