The Coordinating Council of Trade Union Organizations of Iranian Cultivators has reported that in the recruitment exams of the Iranian regime’s Ministry of Education in 2023, approximately 3,000 to 6,000 candidates were rejected for political and religious reasons.
This teachers’ council issued a statement highlighting that the Ministry of Education has not provided accurate statistics, and the matter has been kept silent.
According to this report, the results of these tests were announced at the end of August and the beginning of September 2023. Currently, these volunteers, referred to as “code 19 files,” are in a state of uncertainty.
Many of these individuals achieved high grades in the exam, preventing the regime’s ministry from categorizing them as outright failures. The Coordinating Council of Trade Union Organizations of Iranian Cultivators emphasized that no information was given about their situation, and one to two months later, they were notified of the inclusion of code 19 in their files.
Reasons for including code 19 range from ‘not praying, poor attendance at congregational and Friday prayers and government rallies, poor attendance or non-participation in elections, making political comments on the internet, not adhering to the government’s mandatory hijab, and not following religious rules.’
The council stated that at each step, volunteers are pressured to pretend adherence to the religious and political rituals of the regime.
The Council emphasized, ‘The Ministry of Education’s attempt to monopolize the presence of a certain class as a teacher, without considering the specialized skills required for this job and selectively disqualifying many candidates, leads to the decline of this institution.’
This is not the first time reports have surfaced about the Iranian regime’s efforts to recruit individuals based on political and religious loyalty in the education sector.
Earlier, a teacher from the Literacy Movement mentioned that despite having a master’s degree, the education department did not hire him because only individuals with a specific political or religious alignment were being appointed as teachers.
In recent years, teachers from all over Iran have held numerous protest rallies and marches in different cities regarding their livelihood and job situations. Notably, the regime has been recruiting seminary scholars and mullahs for the country’s education to counteract student dissatisfaction and resistance against the regime.
In May of this year, Ali Farhadi, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Education, told the IRNA news agency, ‘Clergymen do not have any quota in the recruitment test, and after conducting the Article 28 test, the Ministry of Education found out that some 3,500 of those accepted are clerics.’
According to recent statements by authorities of the regime, Iran’s schools are facing a shortage of at least 250,000 to 300,000 teachers, with varying ratios across different provinces.
In Tehran province, the teacher shortage is estimated to be around four thousand. Sistan and Baluchestan province, as one of the deprived areas in the field of education, requires 15 thousand teachers.
Mohammad Hassan Asafari, a regime MP, recently stated that most cities, especially in rural areas, are grappling with a shortage of teachers. He mentioned that sometimes ‘retired teachers’ are being hired or teachers are teaching in two shifts.
According to him, since the beginning of August in 2023, 23,000 classrooms have faced the problem of not having a teacher. While these numbers may seem significant, predictions indicate an alarming upward trend in the coming years.
