Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Thursday, January 13, 2011

The revolution plods on

In this stage of the revolution, the emotional impulse is spent, but rational motivations take over. However, will the logical-sounding steps lead in the direction that the rulers wish? (Remember what happened after the White Revolution promoted by the Shah?)

Iran overhauls education system to erase Western influences

Iran is overhauling its education system to rid it of Western influence, the latest attempt by the government to fortify Islamic values and counter the clout of the country's increasingly secularized middle class.

Starting in September, all Iranian high school students will be introduced to new courses such as "political training" and "living skills" that will warn against "perverted political movements" and encourage girls to marry at an early age, Education Ministry officials say.

In universities, the curricula of law, psychology, sociology and other studies will be drastically altered, with officials from the Science Ministry... working to strip out what they describe as Western theories and replace them with Islamic ones. Dozens of professors have already retired or been fired on the grounds that they did not sufficiently support the new policy.
The changes are aimed at offsetting the growing influence of a middle class that increasingly embraces individualism and shares modern aspirations…

Plans for an educational overhaul arose after sweeping changes in Iran's political system in recent years. Many prominent revolutionary figures have been purged, while the power wielded by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a group of key clerics and Revolutionary Guard commanders has greatly expanded since Ahmadinejad arrived on the political scene in 2003 as Tehran's mayor…

The president and his supporters are undertaking a major restructuring of the economy, raising prices of fuel, energy, bread and other products to market levels while reducing state subsidies. Officials say the move will help the poor, but the lawyers, nurses, double-shift taxi drivers and others who make up the country's broad middle classes say it will break their backs.

The reshaping of the education system, from primary schools to universities, is next on the cabinet's list. The Education Ministry's plan, titled "The Program for Fundamental Evolution in Education and Training," envisages schools becoming "neighborhood cultural bases" where teachers will provide "life" guidance, assisted by selected clerics and members of the paramilitary Basij force…

The ministry will also introduce new courses designed to help students ages 12 to 17 acquire political analysis skills and prevent them from "being trapped by perverted movements and enemy plots or be imprisoned by satellite channels, the Internet and cyberspace," according to an internal ministry document that was distributed in September…

Many educators, however, say the plans are misguided. "Such cultural engineering will not work," said Sadegh Zibakalam, a professor of political science at Tehran University and a critic of the government. "They think they can educate children in schools to be perfect beings but forget that dozens of other factors - parents, friends, satellite and Internet - shape their thoughts."…

Sadegh Zibakalam, a professor of political science at Tehran University, said the revolution illustrated the difficulty of shaping people's thinking. The uprising was joined by hundreds of thousands of students who had been immersed for years in Westernized education programs during the reign of the Western-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, but who ended up helping to topple him.

"It is not what we teach students which makes them support somebody or not," Zibakalam said. "How they act depends on how they are being treated by those in power."