Bibliography 2: #BIB32195

Key	BIB32195
Reference type	Book
Title	Discrimination and Intolerance in Iran’s Textbooks
Author	Paivandi, Saeed
Year	2008
Publisher	Freedom House
Place published	[Washington, D.C.]
Issue	10.
Abstract	The government of Iran is teaching the country’s children to discriminate against women and minorities, to view non-Muslims with suspicion if not contempt, and to perpetuate the regime’s theocratic ideology. Discrimination and intolerance are deeply ingrained in the textbooks that make up the core of Iran’s school curriculum. The country’s textbooks systematically denigrate the importance of women as individuals, largely neglect minority groups or fail to acknowledge them entirely, propagate Shi’ite egocentrism, and encourage hostility toward non-Muslim countries. The textbooks present a particular interpretation of Shi’a Islam as the basis of Iran’s political order and adopt this interpretation as their ideological foundation. They oſten describe this political order as “sacred” and warn that criticism of the regime constitutes opposition to divine “will.” Discrimination and intolerance appear consistently throughout Iran’s textbooks, across the range of subjects in the core curriculum. They are neither accidental nor sporadic. They are values the regime deliberately seeks to instill in the country’s school children. The values propagated in the textbooks are shaping the way the next generation of Iranian citizens will view the outside world and the majority of the country’s population who are not Shi’a Muslim males. The textbooks stress the dichotomy between Iran and its declared enemies and promote antagonism toward the non-Muslim world, extending beyond the United States and Israel to include Europe and Russia. They also disparage the diversity of Iranian society, in which almost half the citizens come from an ethnic or religious minority and women have made significant strides forward (women have, for example, begun to attend university in greater numbers than men). This report is based on a detailed assessment of 95 compulsory school textbooks (published in school year 2006-2007) covering the sciences, humanities, and religious subjects from Grades 1 to 11, totaling some 11,000 pages. It was conducted by a team of native Farsi speakers led by a well-known expert on Iran’s education system. This assessment included a statistical analysis of 3,115 textbook images, a content analysis of 412 lessons in the Farsi textbooks in all grades, and a qualitative analysis of the 95 textbooks to evaluate all forms of discrimination.
Notes	Bahá'í Faith: pp. 2, 5, 43-44, 73, 74.
Language	English
Keywords	PERSECUTION; IRAN; EDUCATION; TEXTBOOKS; DISCRIMINATION; HUMAN RIGHTS
Number of pages	[3], 80
File attachments	internal-pdf://4263618306/Paivandi - Discrimination_Intolerance_Iran_Sch.pdf

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