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A shocking report published by the state-run Farhikhtegan daily on August 19, 2025, exposed the devastating condition of Iran’s public schools: “Students with an average grade below 16 will not have a place in schools this year.”
This is not an isolated decision by a rogue school principal. It reflects a much deeper state policy in which education is no longer treated as a universal right but as a privilege reserved for the elite.
Across the country—from Tehran to Hormozgan, from large cities to impoverished regions—the same stories emerge. Children are being pushed out of classrooms either because their grades fall below arbitrary thresholds or because their families cannot afford hidden costs and extra “fees” demanded by administrators. Families that should be focused on their children’s future are instead forced into humiliating negotiations behind school doors, facing illegal excuses and extortion for additional payments.
The Crisis of Education and School Dropouts in #Iran https://t.co/YfyMtonTMj
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) June 5, 2025
State Policy and Educational Inequality
School officials justify these exclusions by pointing to limited capacity and high demand. As one education expert, Hossein Sistani, explained: “If a school has capacity for 70 students but 100 apply, the principal will prefer to accept the 70 best.”
Yet these rationalizations only mask the regime’s deliberate agenda: forcing families toward costly private schools and turning education into a commodity. Even Sistani admitted: “The country’s policies have shifted toward strengthening private schools.”
This confession makes clear that the silent expulsion of weaker and poorer students is not an accident but the logical outcome of a systematic policy designed to protect class interests and political control. By channeling resources into private institutions, the regime has effectively privatized education, marginalizing the poor and transforming schools into instruments of inequality.
Such policies are not only anti-student, depriving the vulnerable of their most basic support, but also anti-Iranian, trampling on the universal right to equal education.
#Iran News in Brief
With the start of the new school year, the Minister of Education of the Raisi cabinet announced a comprehensive purification plan in schools and the replacement of 20,000 school principals. The regime’s so-called “purification” of its #education system is… pic.twitter.com/2fgxrUvjoJ— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 24, 2023
Social Consequences: Dropouts and Class Divides
This discriminatory selection process produces devastating consequences. Students expelled or rejected are directly exposed to dropping out, loss of motivation, and greater vulnerability to social harm.
Meanwhile, wealthier families can place their children in expensive private schools, while the poor are condemned to exclusion. Education—meant to be the great equalizer—becomes instead a mechanism of division, reproducing class inequality and perpetuating injustice.
The Farhikhtegan report reveals that the exclusion of students is not merely a managerial failure but part of a deliberate policy aligned with the regime’s ideological and class interests. When the fundamental right to equal education is trampled, the message is clear: this regime does not seek to nurture informed citizens but to engineer society through discrimination, control, and elimination.
#ChildLabour in #Iran on the Rise
• Seven million Iranian children are forced into work before they are legally able to
• 30% of these children don’t go 2 school
• 31% are aged between six and 11
• 9% are under six years oldhttps://t.co/XvwTJnGfBN #iranprotests #FreeIran2018 pic.twitter.com/KxtHUh82mu— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) June 12, 2018
Every child left outside the school gates becomes a living indictment of this anti-people and anti-Iranian regime. These are not isolated incidents but mounting evidence of a systemic assault on the nation’s future. By denying education, the regime destroys Iran’s human capital and undermines its youth—the very force that has historically been at the forefront of resistance.
This structural discrimination is not only unjust but dangerous for the regime itself. Every excluded student has the potential to become a rebel, fueling a new generation of resistance. History shows that students played a decisive role in the 1979 anti-monarchic revolution. The heroic scenes of student uprisings can once again return to Iran’s streets.
The reality is stark: a regime that denies even the basic right of children to education cannot claim to provide dignity or justice to the people of Iran. Its deliberate destruction of the nation’s future will only hasten its downfall.