As school starts in the United States, American schools are faced with the dilemma of whether they should force kids to listen to Obama’s liberal elitist agenda, which encourages kids to “show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to (…) parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.” On the other side of the world, Iranian schools are also facing quite a dilemma (though not really as tough as the one faced by the American schools): How to address Ahmadinejad’s disputed election victory, the protests that consumed the country and the continual disregard of human rights of those arrested. This Time’s article, Back to School in Iran: How to Deal with a Bad Summer, while not showing how the Iranian schools are dealing with these issues, does highlight an important point about the Iranian school system. The kids are ahead of the adults:
What does Iran’s pedagogical state produce after 12 years of schooling? Certainly not the “Islamic Citizen” envisioned by state planners, nor the fanatical partisan imagined by the Islamic Republic’s critics in the West. At best, schools contribute to a shared framework for consent and opposition to the state. This is a regime put forever at risk by its own taught principles of justice and Islamic democracy, lessons that members of the Green Wave eagerly incorporated into their protests this past summer. It is not by accident that demonstrators shout “God is great” every night or recycle chants made famous during the 1979 revolution.
In recent days, there has been growing speculation that schools and universities will not open their doors for the fall semester out of concern that students will extend the allegedly Western-inspired protest movement to Iran’s many campuses. The reality is that the Islamic Republic has no one to blame but itself. There is a quote by the late Ayatullah Khomeini that greets kids at the beginning of each elementary school textbook: “Omid e man ba shoma dabistani hast” (My hope lies with you). Iran’s latest social upheaval is not yet a revolution. If it does become one, it will do so because the students are once again ahead of their teachers.
Photo taken from the Time.
