The 'Tragedy' of Education and the 'Imaginary' Country of Hassan Rouhani

Hassan Rouhani, the President of the Executive Branch, made surprising remarks about the educational system on the occasion of the beginning of the 97-96 academic year, which is astonishing for two reasons: first, the continuous practical neglect of him and his government towards the educational system. In the two electoral campaigns of 92 and 96, in the debates of these two periods, and throughout the first four years of Rouhani's government, the development and improvement of education was never a concern for him or his government. For the past 39 years, education has never been a serious issue for officials unless they wanted to pursue the Islamicization program in educational spaces. Rouhani immediately ceded the stage to Khamenei after his attack on the UNESCO document. Therefore, his criticism of the country's education system in the areas of skills and tolerance for others is surprising, as if he has suddenly awakened from a long sleep in the cave of the Islamic Republic and someone informed him that there are schools, teachers, vocational schools, textbooks, and an educational system in the country. His reference to the lack of education in tolerance and the outdated textbooks in the Islamic Republic's system is one of the oddities of the times. The expectation of teaching tolerance from this educational system, and changing textbooks based on scientific developments and forward-looking education stems from the notion that (with a bit of naivety) Hassan Rouhani has had no information about the education system of the Islamic Republic for 39 years and did not even know what transformations were taking place in the country. Can such a thing be believed? Rouhani speaks as if he is addressing the anniversary of the reopening of schools in an imaginary country. He pretends not to know: - The most severe ideological selections in the Islamic Republic have taken place in education; - The most Basij and clerical forces have been selected as teachers to realize the Islamicization program from the ages of six to eighteen; - For two decades, one of the closest totalitarian and authoritarian figures of the regime (Ghadad Adel) has been responsible for writing textbooks, and his colleagues have only sought to eliminate rational and scientific discourse and strengthen Islamist and legal discourse in educational texts; - The most educational resources have been allocated to the regime's 'sample' schools (under the supervision of Ghadad Adel and his family, Ahmad Tavakoli, and similar individuals). These schools are supposed to train the future cadres of the regime, cadres who should not be tolerant or open-minded, nor possess scientific and rational thinking or a vision of the future. Presenting a glorious past at the level of the Arab invasions of other lands and their conquest (and not even the Persian Empire of the Achaemenid era and Iran's share in human culture and civilization) is sufficient; and - The main goal of education in Iran has never been education but rather the gathering of children and teenagers from ordinary families off the streets and training a clerical human from the children and teenagers of clerics and military families. The most severe ideological selections in the Islamic Republic have taken place in education. Hassan Rouhani criticizes the educational system within the same framework that was criticized in the 40s and 50s: memory-based education. All discussions related to the country's education have not occurred to him while he has been the head of a research center. He truly believes he is the President of Iran while having no idea about the educational issues and problems of the country. He thinks that in the same way he sells his imaginary country to his audiences at the United Nations and substitutes pre-Islamist Iran for today’s Iran (in culture, tolerance, and civilization), he can also present his imaginary tolerance and progress in education to the people of Iran. What are the overlooked problems? Rouhani does not mention the fundamental problems of the country's educational system, and probably he and his subordinates are also unaware of these problems. A short list of these problems is as follows: 1. Lack of love for school. In every Iranian documentary and story where school is depicted, when the bell rings, students rush out of school like prisoners released from jail. These images reflect a reality in the Iranian educational system, which is that students do not love their school. The reason is that the school is not tailored to their needs and conditions, and children and teenagers do not have good times there. The school program is designed based on the needs of the government and the expectations that the government has, forcing girls from the age of six to wear hijab even without a religious mandate to get used to this humiliation. The school environment for girls until the last year of high school is a small prison. For all children, school is a space of restrictions, prohibitions, and a constant threat of punishment. Interestingly, Iranian readers should know that in U.S. schools, children are not forced to sit on chairs during class hours for the first six years. They can freely move in class and even in school, only needing to coordinate their going to the library or elsewhere with the teacher. In fact, officials, without realizing it, use this eagerness to escape school and send students as extras to government demonstrations (like November 4) or to welcome the leader and the head of government in cities. Just as an example, most children and teenagers cannot become interested in a space that lacks sports and artistic facilities. The budget for physical education and health promotion in education in 96 was 110 billion tomans, about 40 million dollars for a country of eighty million with 13 million students, while Iran spends several times more annually on wars and expansionist activities in the Middle East. The budget for music in public schools in Iran is zero. 2. They should not learn. The subjects that students need to learn in today’s world are life sciences (biology and chemistry), exact sciences (physics, mathematics, and computer science), mother tongue (Persian and ethnic languages), foreign language, and social sciences (history and geography of Iran and the world, economics, and sociology). The Islamic Republic has failed and is a disaster in each of these areas, both in content and in educational methods. Students should not learn world history because they might draw parallels between fascism and communism with Islamism or the history of church repression. They should not learn the history of Iran, especially the Pahlavi era, because they might compare it with the last four decades. They should not learn English because it is a gateway to Western culture. They should not learn social sciences because the Islamic version has been created and transmitted by clerics and ideologues. It is very rare for a student to be able to read, write, and understand even one page in Arabic and English correctly without attending private classes, despite several years of Arabic and English language education in schools. 3. The poorest ministry. Teachers and schools in Iran are at the end of the line when it comes to budget allocation. If national budgets are reduced, the first place where resources are cut is education. The justification is that education has the most personnel. The share of education from the public budget (its transparent section) is only 3 percent. For this reason, Iranian teachers live in relative poverty. Consequently, talented individuals in various scientific fields are not attracted to education. Education has become a place to attract those who are ideologically aligned or pretending to be aligned, who are desperate everywhere and accept the meager salaries of education. In contrast, seminaries and clerics, along with the military, are at the front of the line, without any significant qualitative difference between their personnel and those who are attracted to education. In Iran, it is rare to find a teacher satisfied with their job in public schools. Teachers usually try to find a job in private schools (serving the ruling class) or use their school attendance to find students for their private lessons. 4. Lack of a sense of belonging. Iranian citizens have less of a special feeling towards their schools because the schools do not belong to them. It is impossible for a group of people from a neighborhood to request to play sports in the yard of a school (they do not dare) because they know the answer will be negative. Schools are either public (the exclusive property of the government) or private (belonging to Mr. So-and-so or a group of such-and-such that they have named non-profit). People who do not consider schools as their own do not participate in their programs, administration, and resources except based on mandatory tuition. If schools were handed over to boards of trustees elected by the people, then a. Teachers could choose their textbooks under the supervision of the board of trustees and the main outlines of the government’s curriculum. In this situation, the production of textbooks would be removed from the monopoly of the corrupt and totalitarian government sector in Iran, and competition in the production of such books would emerge; b. Parents would voluntarily take on some activities, such as forming and managing school libraries, and would spend time there. In public schools, the phenomenon of libraries either does not exist or they have placed books there that prevent students from becoming readers; c. Local people would not deprive the children of a priest or Baha’is or Afghan immigrants living in the area from education, and then the claim of the head of state at the United Nations about tolerance towards minorities would not be a lie and deception; and d. Without coercion, the people would individually and collectively (for example, through taxes for schools approved by the people) help the schools that belong to them and cut the government out of education. If Rouhani and his government want to educate students for the future, teach students tolerance, and make education meaningful, they should hand over schools to their real owners, namely the local people and teachers, dissolve the textbook organization, refrain from interfering in teacher hiring, and assist schools wherever they seek help. This is no longer the kind of granting autonomy to provinces that is withheld from the people under the pretext of separatism. (It is unclear if the people of Isfahan or Semnan manage their province themselves and elect their governor and district governor, what country they will form) In Iran, the transfer of education occurs when the government wants to evade the burden of the education budget, but the transfer should be to hand over all affairs to the people and at the same time assist them in improving quality.