Inequalities in Iranian Education: Representations of Gender, Socioeconomic Status, Ethnic Diversity, and Religious Diversity in School Textbooks and Curricula

We will explore issues related to educational equity with respect to gender, so-cioeconomic status, and religious and ethnic minorities among primary and secondary school pupils of Iran.¹ In so doing, we will discuss policies and practices related to the language of instruction, national curricula, and textbook content as measures of educational opportunity provided to under-privileged and minority groups within Iran. We will also explore the degree to which educational content and educational implementation deviate from each other with respect to minority and under-privileged groups. We will focus our discussion on equal educational opportunity, namely, equality of educational participation and equality of educational results.

We begin by outlining a descriptive overview of Iran's education system and the current policies that directly affect females, the economically underprivileged, and ethnic and religious minorities. Next, we will focus on Iran's primary school practices, curricula, and textbooks and its treatment of these groups. We argue that educational inequity results from a disregard of demographic realities and the range of ideological and cultural diversity that exists in present-day Iran. Instead, we see its diversity exchanged for lopsided depictions of homogeneity, absence of entire minority groups, and cookie-cutter ideological representations.