Iran's Coordination Council of Teachers' Unions Warns About the Consequences of Clergy Presence in Schools

On Thursday, January 18, the Coordination Council of Teachers' Unions in Iran issued a statement addressing families about the "consequences of the presence of clergy in schools and the continuation of ideological education policies" by the government. The statement noted that the educational system in Iran has consistently served as a tool for representing the official values of the ruling regime and reproducing an ideological educational system over the past 45 years. It emphasized that in this selective framework, the human aspect of education is absent. The teachers' union stressed that the educational structure is only of interest to the established government to the extent that it trains soldiers to advance the political-ideological goals of the regime. However, according to the evaluation in this statement, a look at the status of schools and the demands and dreams of the younger generation in Iran shows that not only has the government been unable to advance such a policy in the educational structure, but there is also a significant gap between the official norms and values and the cultural values of the new generation. The Coordination Council of Teachers' Unions in Iran wrote: "The failure of government policies in the educational structure to advance ideological education became increasingly evident during the Jina/Mahsa movement," adding that the widespread participation of students and teachers with protesters in various forms symbolizes the government's failed attempts over more than four decades to unify the educational structure with the teachings of political Islam. The statement referred to the government's efforts during and after the "Women, Life, Freedom" movement to "manage the situation" through the arrest of students and teachers, followed by widespread dismissals and relocations of educational staff in schools, stating that "one of the declared and promotional policies over the past year has been the hiring of clerics and seminarians in education and their deployment in schools as educational staff." From the perspective of this teachers' union, the outlined goal is to cleanse schools of specialized educational staff and replace them with seminarians who have the least expertise in the field of educating children and adolescents. In another part of the statement, it was noted that the clergy has a significant presence in all political, economic, social, security, military, and even industrial fields. It stated: "The widespread hiring of clerics in education and the policy of replacing teachers with clerics in schools is a reactionary move back to the traditional schools of the 1930s that would squander all the achievements of education in the past 100 years." Setar Rahmani, a member of the Teachers' Union and a university professor in Britain, told Voice of America: "The council is trying to warn students, their families, and teachers across the country about the government's efforts to turn schools into traditional houses through the policy of sanctification, religious idolization, and instrumental use of education." However, he pointed out that the Islamic Republic has not succeeded in its 44-year effort in this direction, adding: "The ancestors of this regime also tried to prevent the establishment of schools during the Constitutional Revolution to preserve the traditional house as a source of income for them, but their failure to maintain the traditional system due to rapid technological changes and the capitalist system's need for skilled labor has thwarted the Islamic Republic's attempts to revert to the past." Mr. Rahmani further referenced recent statements by some officials in the Islamic Republic's education system. For example, Hamid Nikzad, an advisor to the Minister of Education, announced the plan to connect "mosque, school, and home," or the Minister of Education who spoke about hiring three thousand seminarians and a number of jihadist forces, cultural and Quranic activists. He added: "On the other hand, the results of the 2021 PIRLS test regarding the 'conditions of Iranian students' astonished many officials and experts; results that showed Iran to be one of the weakest countries in the region." Setar Rahmani emphasized that "the decline in educational quality, along with the existence of overcrowded classes of 40 students, the lack of qualified teachers filtered through the regime, and the low scores of students all testify to the failure of the ideological project of school reform." He also believes that the council's statement indicates that "injecting a political ideology into schools has fundamentally failed to succeed in the minds and psyche of children and is a preemptively failed project, but the instrumental use of it in the short term, by creating a security atmosphere, may somewhat diminish the protests of teachers, students, and families, but it cannot extinguish them." Mr. Rahmani elaborated on this issue, stating: "The use of this tool is contradictory to the ongoing technological transformations that are rapidly creating significant changes in the structure and framework of existing systems, and its history ended after the power of churches was overthrown in medieval Europe and traditional schools in Iran during the Constitutional Revolution and thereafter, turning against itself and drawing students more towards scientific subjects on a larger scale." The Coordination Council of Teachers' Unions in Iran emphasized in its statement that the educational policies of the Islamic Republic "stem from a lack of proper understanding of Iranian children and adolescents and a 44-year habit of prescriptive policies." The council added that "the presence of non-specialized individuals such as clerics in schools can make the situation much worse because their presence in schools is not limited to educational and religious matters, and in recent months, instances of clerics being present in management or educational deputy positions and even in specialized subjects in some schools have been observed." The statement indicated that the conflict between the values and norms accepted by children and adolescents and the prescriptive values of clerics could lead to confrontations in school environments and could transform into scenes of ideological battles. The Coordination Council of Teachers' Unions in Iran emphasized that "such experiences will have destructive effects on children and adolescents." This teachers' union also pointed out that the presence of clerics in schools with specific guidelines for advancing ideological education could take on a form of securitization of schools, adding that the specific guidelines of these individuals involve aligning the prevailing value policies in schools. Accordingly, the statement noted: just as the implementation of these policies has failed at the societal level and the government has been forced to apply extensive security and disciplinary instructions in dealing with adolescents and youth, reaching such a level of confrontation with the presence of clerics in schools is predictable; especially this danger is greater for female students and in the issue of dealing with optional hijab. The Coordination Council of Teachers' Unions in Iran warned Iranian families not to be indifferent to the consequences of such policies for their children, stating: "In recent years, some of our colleagues in this union have incurred significant costs in opposing ideological education, defending free education, and advocating for students' rights. At the end of this statement, they called on families to engage in civil resistance against the implementation of such policies in schools, stating that teachers will stand by them in this path, as children and students have always been a 'red line' for teachers.