These days, the destructive and devastating consequences of the deep class divide in Iran, according to economic experts, have put more than 90% of the deprived people in Iran under the poverty line and they have no chance for a fair educational situation.
The state-run daily Arman, on 2 October, has depicted the looting policies of the education mafia as follows:
“One can easily see that schools have been transformed into commercial-financial institutions whose main concern is to make a profit, and to look at the student as a wealthy customer, dividing society into two blocks, a system of social discrimination and institutionalizing the class conflict in the society. ”
In another example, the official IRNA news agency on 15 September 2019 published a report titled “The financial circle of nonprofit schools”. It disclosed the corruption of schools and the educational system in Iran: Currently for primary schools in Tehran, the minimum tuition fee is at least: 32 million rials and the maximum is 94.27 million rials, and the average cost of students in junior high schools is at least 55.46 million rials, and the maximum is 115.41 million rials, and the cost of high school’s senior years is 59.36 million rials and at the maximum 146.21 million rials.
While, according to Article 30 of Iran’s constitution, education should be free at the elementary and secondary levels, but now, according to government media, 24 types of nonprofit schools are founded and are run by government officials while they all loot the parents of the students.
More catastrophic is Iran’s state media confession: “Now 11 percent of the 14 million students study in non-public schools, yet the sixth development plan law said that this must decrease to 15 percent.”
With the majority of the people living under the poverty line and deprived of basic livelihood, Iran’s government seeks to reduce the number of so-called state-run schools on the one hand and to concede the country’s educational system to the private sector by increasing the number of not-for-profit schools.
The government’s official website “Farikhtegan”, on 25 September 2017 confessed about the lack of financial transparency in all nonprofit schools: A simple query makes it easy to find out that these institutions violate all financial rules, and why is there no inspection about the financial violation of these institutions?
One of the main reasons is that these schools are mainly run by government officials.
A better understanding of the catastrophe that truly hurts every Iranian can be found in the confession by the state-run ISNA news agency: The non-profits schools are divided into first, second, and third grades, based on the services they provide and accordingly the rate of the tuition differs.
With the per capita educational gap in the country facing a shortage of 70%, millions of Iranian children and adolescents in deprived areas have to walk long distances to reach school. Yet, the children of officials have the best school, university, and educational chances.
Increasing school tuition while half of the population live below the absolute poverty line, and the monthly salaries of labor are just 15 million rials and the monthly salaries of government employees are at best less than 30 million rials, makes the life situation of the worse. It turns out that poor laborers and employees, even if they dedicate all their monthly wages to one of their children’s education, still cannot enroll one of their children into such schools.
Sale of home furnishings to cover education expenses:
The condition is so catastrophic that the state-run Tasnim news agency confessed that more than nine percent of Iranian families have to sell their livelihoods to get their children educated because they cannot afford to do so from their normal income.
A brief look at government media confessions at the start of the new school year reveals well the devastated structure of education in Iran:
– August 8, Government Policy Journal: “The amount of inequality in education spending between richest and poorest families is about 1 out of a factor of 53, meaning that the wealthy people have spent 53 times more than the poor people for the education of their children.” Worse is that the students chosen for the university are from the special schools and rich people so that the children of the poor people have no chance of higher education.
– Aftab Journal, 23 September: “Many of our students are still studying in tents, and of course the rate of violence in our schools is very high, and this is a big problem, and while governments change, these problems are still there.”
Many of the classes are overfilled with students, while in some schools just in one class there are more than 60 students, the state-run media Resalat wrote.
Source » irannewsupdate