There are less than two weeks left before schools in Iran reopen. The costs of the first month of attending school are many times higher than the wages of the children’s parents which are creating major problems for Iran’s community.

The costs are as follows:

  • Stationery 230,000 Tomans
  • Textbook 50,000 Tomans
  • School tuition fee 7 million tomans
  • Student uniform 200,000 Tomans
  • Schoolbag 250,000 Tomans

That is, 7.73 million tomans are only the cost of entering school for an elementary school student. The cost of entering a public school with a little reduction in tuition fees is above one million tomans. This is while the base wage of 14 million Iranian workers is 2.6 million tomans per month.

Nurses’ wages are equivalent to workers’ wages. And the wages of medical internship students are lower than the basic wages of workers. Those fees and these wages say that for many of the children of wage earners in Iran, there is no prospect of returning to school.

In a piece titled ‘Disaster is on the way,’ Jahan Sanat newspaper addressed the crisis of the cost of supplying stationery and textbooks to families at the beginning of the school year and wrote:

“With the beginning of the school year, textbooks and other supplies needed by students, which are supplied at a heavy price, for millions of families involved with livelihood problems the situation will be difficult even far from their power to earn, and books have a 25% increase in price compared to the previous school year.

“The price of the first-grade textbooks is 29,500 Tomans or about 100,000 Tomans for the textbooks of fifth-grade students. Families should pay 2 million tomans only for stationery and buy a 40-sheet notebook by paying 22,000 tomans.

“To send every teenager to school, the family must pay a cost of more than 3 million Tomans, while due to the economic complications of the coronavirus outbreak, the inevitable unemployment and the expensiveness of public necessities resulting from inflation and the devaluation of the rial, millions of people from all walks of life have joined the unemployed and needy in the class downhill.” (State-run daily Jahan-e-Sanat, September 18, 2021)

Therefore, many of the children are forced to drop out the school and they will inevitably join the millions of street children and labor children who are exploited and misused daily by the state-run mafia gangs.

The state-run daily Eghtesad News on June 15, 2021, wrote: “Most of them either don’t have access to mobile phones or tablets or live in areas where the Internet isn’t there.”

“A large number of children gave up education, taking a different path instead of going to school.” (State-run daily Hamdeli, September 22, 2019)

But is there another way worse than becoming a street or labor child losing the youth years with all its dreams and opportunities?

Then the ‘Iranian University Students News in an article entitled, ‘3.5 million students likely to drop out of school after lacking access to mobile phones/ One-third of a simple worker’s salary will be for stationery’, on September 18, 2021, wrote:

“The lack of access to mobile phones and tablets by about 3.5 million students to benefit from virtual education is another important challenge that is likely to be repeated in the new school year, which will make it more serious to worry about the student’s leaving or continuing of the education.”

Undoubtedly, the failure of students’ education is one of the problems that can be considered as a big blow for the structure of society, because the development and progress of any society depend on the existence of capable, knowledgeable human resources, and this will not be possible except by bypassing the steps of science and knowledge by the future builders of the society.