Iranian soldiers also teachers

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32562, 23 March 1971, Page 7

Iranian soldiers also teachers

(By

RICHARD BOURNE

; in the "Guardian," reprinted by arrangement)

LONDON. “The problem of a shortage of teachers is international,” says Mrs Farroukh Parsa, Iran’s Minister of Education. Her own country has developed a novel solution, which is illustrated in a photographic exhibition in the Iranian Embassy in London.

Put simply, Iran’s solution is to send conscript secondary school graduates into rural villages—where regular teachers have no wish to go and the Government has had no money to send them—to teach literacy and development skills. The conscripts, about 10,000 a year, spend 20 months doing this job as part of their- military service.

Thanks to this Education Corps, devised by the Shah himself and a key element in his regime’s “White Revolution,” it is claimed that the percentage of illiterates in Iran fell from about 80 per cent in 1962 to 50 per cent last year. Though such figures are always suspect, Unesco has a healthy respect for the achievement and, alongside Cuba, Iran has probably had the best record on literacy in the past decade. TEMPORARY Mrs Parsa, a medical doctor and for 12 years the principal of a large girls’ high school in Tehran, regards the Education Corps as a temporary but desirable phenomenon. In the course of time, she hopes, the schools that the corps has set up with the help of villagers will produce young people who are willing to return home as teachers themselves. In the meantime, four fifths of the corps personnel —who might not have very bright employment prospects —have volunteered to go on serving as regular teachers at the end of their military service. In this way it has been possible to extend the network of the orthodox educational system at the same time. ‘‘Our trouble is that we have over 30,000 villages with a population of less than 250, often half a day’s walk from the next and with no roads between,” she explained. It bears some resemblance to the countryside of Victorian England at the time of the first Education Act 100 years ago. In Iran, however, the Education Corps is expected to teach both adults and children. “It is easier to teach the child-

ren—their ideas are not formed yet.” The average cost of educating someone at a school run by the corps is less than a third of that of a conventional school. At the village level the soldier-teachers are supposed to work closely with village councils and to help establish village courts. Twenty of their schools are grouped under an education supervisor who must be a graduate of a College of Education with five years’ supervisory experience. The teacher-pupil ratio is generous by British standards: the average class is about 25 and if the numbers rise above 35 the corps man is entitled to one or mbre additions. HELPING GIRLS Although their enlistment is slightly different, about a fifth of the corps teachers are women. In a way their role is perhaps the most significant, for it is girls who have come off worst in education in the past The corps explain about sanitation and birth control as well as how to drain a marsh or raise cotton output. Mrs Parsa has all the difficulties of Education Ministers everywhere shortages of funds, shortages of science teachers, and the like. She has just overseen a rearrangement of the phases of Schooling and is interested in comprehensive secondary schools and in extending the uses of broadcasting in education. At present Iran has an acute angled pyramid: three million in . elementary schools followed by less than a million in. secondary schools, with 60,000 secondary school graduates competing for three-to four thousand university places.

It is at this latter point that the Education Corps fulfils a social need by taking up some of the frustrated would-be university entrants. “This is the biggest educational benefit of the lot Young men who had never had to do anything for themselves must go into small villages and manage on their own. They come home again as different people,” she said.

“This is the best solution to the youth problem.” It is the same philosophy as that of the Peace Corps or Community Service Volunteers, given a tang of Islamic idealism and adopted by a developing country on its home soil. Both Pakistan and Afghanistan are considering borrowing the idea.