t of Baha'i institutes.

By far the most significant advance in this latter respect occurred over a
period of more than two decades, beginning in the 1970s in Colombia, where
a systematic and sustained programme of education in the Writings was
devised and soon adopted in neighbouring countries. Influenced by the
Colombian community's parallel efforts in the field of social and economic
development, the breakthrough was all the more impressive in the fact that
it was achieved against a background of violence and lawlessness that was
deranging the life of the surrounding society.

The Colombian achievement proved a source of great inspiration and example
to Baha'i communities elsewhere in the world. By the time the Four Year
Plan ended, over one hundred thousand believers were involved world-wide
in the programmes of the more than three hundred permanent training
institutes. In accomplishing this goal, a majority of regional institutes
had carried the process a stage further by creating networks of "study
circles" which utilize the talents of believers to replicate the work of
the institute at a local level. It is already apparent that the success of
the institute work has significantly reinforced the long-term process by
which a universal system of Baha'i education will take shape.(128)

Although the struggles of these decades were relatively modest--at least
when set against the standard of the Heroic Age--they provide the present
generation of Baha'is with a window on what Shoghi Effendi describes as
the cyclical nature of the Faith's history: "a series of internal and
external crises, of varying severity, devastating in their immediate
effects, but each mysteriously releasing a corresponding measure of divine
power, lending thereby a fresh impulse to its unfoldment."(129) These
words put into perspective the succession of efforts, experiments,
heartbreaks and victories that characterized the beginning of large-scale
teaching, and prepared the Baha'i community for the much greater
challenges ahead.

Throughout history, the masses of humanity have been, at best, spectators
at the advance of civilization. Their role has been to serve the designs
of whatever elite had temporarily assumed control of the process. Even the
successive Revelations of the Divine, whose objective was the liberation
of the human spirit, were, in time, taken captive by "the insistent self",
were frozen into man-made dogma, ritual, clerical priv