Faraj Sarkohi - Radio Farda - April 7, 2009
A few days before the Iranian New Year, the head of the Research and Educational Planning Organization of the Ministry of Education reiterated the statements of the Minister of Education about the necessity of segregating boys' and girls' textbooks. The director-general of textbooks at the ministry also announced the initiation of a plan for gender segregation in school textbooks.
Alireza Ahmadi, the Minister of Education, during his tenure as acting minister, referred to the segregation of textbooks based on what he called "the different needs of boys and girls" as one of his agendas. Upon assuming the ministerial role, he stated during a conference on the "Examination and Definition of the Initial Map of the National Curriculum" that “gender, ethnic, racial, and geographical characteristics,” “local languages,” and “differences in the customs and traditions of nomadic, rural, and urban students” must be considered in textbooks. He argued that because the emotional, psychological, and physical needs of boys and girls at similar ages differ, national curricula and textbooks must address these needs.
Bahar Mohammadian, the head of the Research and Educational Planning Organization, clarified the minister's statements just before Nowruz, emphasizing that some abilities in girls develop earlier than in boys. For instance, he pointed to the earlier onset of puberty in girls as a reason for the necessity of gender-segregated textbooks, asking, “Shouldn’t there be a response to the earlier maturity of girls in textbooks?”
Ali Zo’alem, the director-general of textbooks, announced to the ISNA news agency that the plan for gender-segregated textbooks was underway, stating that “some textbooks will be gender-segregated by 10-15%.”
The minister and other officials have not yet clarified which of the three educational levels—elementary, middle, or high school—nor which subjects or topics this segregation will apply to. However, their references to including lessons to help female students fulfill their future roles as mothers, combined with 30 years of experience and the patriarchal culture prevalent in Iranian society and governmental institutions, indicate the direction this initiative is likely to take.
The only explicitly stated reason for gender-segregated textbooks mentioned by education officials is the earlier puberty of girls compared to boys. However, in a society where openly discussing sexual issues remains a moral taboo, and schools and families refrain from teaching sexual education to children, adolescents, and young adults, this reasoning is unconvincing.
The successful experience of societies that have systematically incorporated sexual education into mixed-gender school programs demonstrates that scientific sexual education does not require segregating boys' and girls' textbooks.
Uneven Development and the Right to Education in One’s Mother Tongue
On the other hand, segregating textbooks—or at least accounting for ethnic, regional, and geographical differences, as well as diverse lifestyles and native languages in a multilingual society like Iran—could potentially address some shortcomings of the textbook standardization plan.
The textbook standardization initiative, especially at the elementary level, has overlooked the unique characteristics of Iranian society compared to countries that have experienced balanced, endogenous development or nations where the majority of citizens speak a single native language. Despite its benefits, this initiative has led to discrimination against certain segments of society, made literacy more challenging, and created other problems.
The standardization plan, introduced in the 1960s, aimed to end chaos, subjective approaches, and the teaching of textbooks filled with inaccurate or outdated information. Expert groups were tasked with writing textbooks that were attractively designed, formatted, and illustrated.
However, this plan entirely ignored the diversity of native languages and varied lifestyles stemming from Iran’s uneven societal growth. Most elementary textbooks were written based on the lifestyle of the urban middle class.
Elements in these textbooks that played a significant role in their content were unfamiliar and alien to urban fringe-dwelling poor children, as well as rural and nomadic children, presenting a portrayal of life in another world.
While Persian-speaking children learn to read and write in their native language during their first years of school, non-Persian-speaking children must simultaneously learn an entirely new language. Learning a new language alongside Persian-speaking peers who are only learning to read and write their mother tongue, in textbooks that exclude the lifestyle of the majority, leads to educational setbacks, cultural and psychological challenges, and discrimination against Kurdish, Turkish, Baluchi, and Arabic-speaking children. For these children, the early years of school often become a bitter experience, further exacerbated by the pain of being separated from their mother tongue.
As early as the 1960s, experts criticized the elementary textbook standardization plan. In one of Samad Behrangi’s works, A Probe into Iran’s Educational Issues, these criticisms, based on the practical experience of a Turkish-speaking teacher in Azerbaijani villages, were compiled. Behrangi even wrote an alphabet book for teaching Persian to Turkish-speaking children that accounted for regional diversity and different lifestyles. However, the advantages of the standardization plan and official policies recognizing Persian as the only authorized written language prevented these criticisms from being seriously addressed.
Adapting textbooks to Iran’s uneven growth structures, diverse cultures, and different lifestyles, while challenging and unresolved, is still easier than writing textbooks in the various mother tongues prevalent in Iran.
In the modern educational system and schools established during the Constitutional Revolution and the Pahlavi era, the “right to education in one’s mother tongue” has been entirely ignored.
The proposal to teach in mother tongues alongside Persian as the shared language of all Iranian citizens—a solution to many difficulties—has not been welcomed, partly due to bitter experiences with separatist movements and the prevalent, albeit incorrect, conflation of educational issues with political matters.
A middle-ground solution—adapting educational content to the country’s diverse mother tongues, regions, and lifestyles—remains vague, general, and without a feasible implementation plan.
The theoretical and practical complexities of aligning school textbooks with native languages, regional conditions, and diverse lifestyles are such that the Ministry of Education’s initiative, despite its stated intentions, remains limited to gender-segregated textbooks. This has heightened concerns that the real aim is not to address the challenges of textbook standardization but to restrict girls’ education to fields such as homemaking, cooking, sewing, and childcare, exclude women from social, scientific, political, and economic participation, and perpetuate gender segregation in alignment with a worldview that reduces women to housebound mothers—an approach that contradicts the contemporary realities of Iranian life, the needs of the time, and the principle of equality for all human beings.
The link to the original article in Farsi on Radio Farda:
تفکیک کتاب های درسی، آموزش مسایل جنسی یا تبعیض علیه زنان؟