Closure of Humanities in High Schools: From Myth to Reality

The announcement of the closure of the humanities field in public high schools in Iran has sparked widespread reactions in the media and social networks. When the director general of education in Tehran announced that starting next year, students would not be able to enroll in the humanities field and must register in culture schools, two interpretations emerged in the media and social networks: In the first assessment, this action was seen as part of the overall policy of the Iranian government, particularly by Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic, to limit the number of humanities fields in universities and change their content. In the second assessment, the use of the term 'culture schools' by this education official led to the perception that from now on, the humanities field in high schools would be overseen by Alireza Motahari, who has initiated several schools named 'Culture' in Tehran. Even the subsequent explanations by the director general of education in Tehran, which were reflected on the Ministry of Education's website and the Tehran education website, went unheard, and not only did they not reach social media and foreign media, but they also did not find their way into domestic media to challenge these two interpretations. According to explanations provided by Esfandiar Chehrebend, the director general of education in Tehran, the expansion of culture schools is based on the implementation of the fundamental transformation document of education. According to this fundamental transformation, which was approved by the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution in 2011, the Ministry of Education is obliged to develop and implement a program to expand and strengthen schools and educational and training collections specific to the humanities. These culture schools are entirely state-run and have no connection with similarly named private schools. According to this education official, the current program presented by the education department of Tehran is to utilize the capacity of the state-run culture schools, which have a 15-year history and provide special humanities education. Accordingly, it has been stated that the number of culture schools in Tehran will increase from 12 existing schools to 40 schools. However, these explanations were not widely heard, leading to a situation where Mohammad Baqer Nobakht, the government spokesman, stated in a press conference on Tuesday, December 8, that he would ask the Minister of Education to explain this matter. The ups and downs of humanities in high schools began when the Ministry of Education organized culture schools at the second secondary level in 2006. In that same year, culture high schools in Tehran offered literature and humanities in areas 4, 5, 7, 10, and 13 for girls and in areas 2, 7, 8, 10, and 16 for boys, conducting exams among third-grade junior high school graduates for enrollment in the first year and to fill mid-level capacities from first, second, and third-year high school students. It was also announced that students who achieved provincial and national rankings in scientific and literary competitions, related olympiads in literature and humanities, poetry, essay, storytelling competitions, and similar events would be prioritized under equal conditions. At that time, the condition for participating in the entrance exam for entering the first year of high school was enrollment in the third grade of junior high school in the 2006-2007 academic year and achieving an overall average of 17. The reason for this was that evaluations indicated that most students entering the humanities field at the secondary level had weaker grades compared to students continuing their studies in mathematics, experimental sciences, and vocational fields. The desire to pursue humanities in Iranian universities significantly increased from the 1990s to the early 2000s. This trend continued until the early 2010s. According to a report published by Beheshti University in Tehran, the number of students who changed their major from technical and basic sciences to humanities increased nearly sevenfold between 2003 and 2013. However, this trend was not the same in high schools. In the studied period, students with better grades in junior high or first secondary (according to the new naming) were still inclined to continue their studies in mathematics, experimental sciences, and vocational fields. Although gradually in recent years, the inclination of students to pursue mathematics has also decreased. Regardless of discussions about the social, educational, and economic reasons for the decreased interest in pursuing university education in the humanities, it can be inferred that one of the reasons for empty seats in humanities fields at universities is the lower inclination of high school students in the humanities to attend university. Despite the fact that in 2014 nearly 150 educational programs were removed from the list of student selection in universities, the empty seats in university humanities fields continue. Mahmoud Bastami, deputy of the National Educational Assessment Organization, stated this August that there are nearly 13,000 empty seats in mathematics fields and nearly 100,000 empty seats in humanities fields in universities. According to statistics from the National Assessment Organization, this year, the humanities test group has a capacity of 219,000 students, while only 160,000 candidates participated in this group. Thus, the chance of acceptance in humanities fields has increased by 260%. This reality shows that students entering the humanities field in high schools have the least inclination to continue their education at university. A more ambiguous outlook for humanities students Based on statistics, it does not seem that reducing the capacity of high schools in the humanities contradicts the outlook for continuing higher education in humanities in the country. However, this is not the whole issue: Currently, about 3 million 210 thousand students are studying in the second secondary level, and if we accept the 30% criterion regarding the share of humanities among high school students that has been expressed in recent years, we can say that more than 960,000 students are studying in the humanities field. Of this number, nearly 100,000 live in Tehran, studying in about 1,136 high schools in Tehran. Now, the Ministry of Education has announced that the capacity considered for these students is a maximum of 40 high schools. From the explanations of the director general of education in Tehran, it appears that one of the goals of education is to direct these students towards vocational and technical fields. Continuing education in vocational schools in Tehran is mentioned as a new option for students who previously studied in the humanities field. Based on this assumption, another outlook for these Tehran students is the 374 vocational schools that exist in Tehran. Meanwhile, Mohsen Hosseini Moghadam, the director general of the Technical and Vocational Education Office of the Ministry of Education, recently stated that "in the 2016-2017 academic year, with the introduction of the new educational system to the second secondary level, under the best conditions, vocational schools in the country will still face about a 30% space shortage, which can impact the educational quality of students." Now the question arises that considering that nearly 100,000 Tehran students in the first stage and more than 860,000 students in other regions of the country in later stages are not at an age to enter the labor market (even if we ignore the crisis of recession and unemployment in the country), what conditions will they be placed in following this new transformation? In the new conditions, it may be possible to reduce the number of humanities students and lessen the burden on high schools, thereby somewhat alleviating the financial burden on the Ministry of Education, which is in a financial crisis, but it is unclear what impact this will have on the lives of hundreds of thousands of students for whom there is no capacity to absorb them in the country's vocational schools and few culture high schools.