Iraq News Now

While the Iranian regime from day one of its establishment

claimed to be a heaven for the poor and needy, it’s the poor who suffer the

most under its rule, causing the rise of the super-rich and the dirt-poor

classes among the Iranian society.
Iran's constitution considers

education until the end of high school a basic right that should be provided

for free. In practice, however, public schools have lost all their credibility

and quality.
In an article published on

August 11, Javan newspaper, close to the terrorist-designated Iranian

Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), digs into the so-called privatization

of education.
“This drive was launched years

ago and is resulting now in a situation where there isn’t even a single student

from public schools from the top candidates of university entrance

examinations. Eighty seven percent of the top candidates in the nation-wide

university entrance exams were from private schools while the remaining 13

percent were students from competitive public schools,” the piece explains.
Competitive public schools, or

as they’re called in Iran, exemplary public schools, are funded by the

government. However, these schools have very difficult entrance examinations

that exclude the vast majority of the country’s students.
Javan newspaper then concludes,

“This shows that moving along the path of privatizing a task that should be

done by the government, has resulted in a situation where poorer families don’t

have the ability to send their children to private schools or competitive

public schools. Since the quality of education in normal public schools is low

and there is no justice of education in the country, they are deprived of the

opportunity to enter good universities and rise in higher education. This leads

to an increase in social injustice.”
Mohammadreza Vaez Mahdavi, an adviser to the Minister of

Cooperatives, Labor and Social Welfare, acknowledges that “more than nine

percent of Iranian families have to sell their furniture and home appliances

due to the fact that they cannot pay for education with their normal income.”
The Siasat-e Rooz newspaper

wrote on August 9: “The inequality in education expenses between the families

in the top decile and the bottom decile is one to 53. This means that the

richest ten percent expend for their children's education 53 times more than

the poorest ten percent.”
“The top individuals in

entrance examinations (for universities) are from special, non-public schools,”

the article continues, adding that “this is a warning about the unequal state

of the country’s education system where now universities and higher education

also become privileges for the society’s special groups.”
Being close to Iranian Supreme

Leader Ali Khamenei’s faction, Siasat-e Rooz seeks

to exonerate the entire regime and place the blame specifically on the

government of Iranian regime President Hassan Rouhani. The “quest to decrease

the costs of education has targeted public schools, reproducing education

inequality,” it adds.
The Tasnim news

agency, close to the IRGC Quds Force, another terrorist-designated entity of

Iran’s regime, interviews an assistant professor at the Allameh University on

this subject.
“Recently, UNESCO has advised

governments to dedicate four to six percent of the gross domestic product and

15 to 20 percent of their budgets to public education. In Iran, however, only

1.5 to 2 percent of the GDP, and ten percent of the public budget are allocated

to education.”
Tasnim also

writes that in rich countries, only 18 percent of children’s education costs

are paid by parents. In Iran under the mullahs’ rule, families have to cover

around 33 percent of their children’s education costs.