Approximately 327,000 children in the streets of Tehran who weren’t going to school
It is no secret that the Iranian regime spends billions of dollars on its terrorist and extremist ambitions abroad. And these foreign expenditures, aimed at preserving the regime’s hold on power at home and the region, are not only taking their toll on the livelihoods of the people of Iran but are also negatively affecting the lives of the future generations of Iran.
On September 14, Iran’s Ruydad news website published a report in which it revealed damning statistics about the educational conditions of children inside Iran. According to this state-run website, Iranian regime officials are offering conflicting accounts of how many Iranian children have or don’t have access to basic education. Writes the site: “Like many other national statistics, the exact number of children who have been deprived of education is not available. The figures offered by the ministry education differs from that of the Well-being Organization. The Mardom-Nahad body and other NGOs also offer different information.”
The report concludes that such differences between the figures itself speak to the criticality of the situation.
According to Ruydad, the caretaker of the Iranian regime’s labor ministry says that in the first three months of the Persian year (March-June), the government has identified approximately 327,000 children in the streets of Tehran who weren’t going to school. This is the statistics offered by the Well-being Organization.
Taking this figure as a basis to offset the entire country, in the most optimistic calculation, in which the uneducated children of other provinces (31 in total) are estimated at a third of Tehran, the total sums up to around 3.5 million children across the country who aren’t going to school.
The Ruydad report writes: “The situation could be worse than this: According to the most recent consensus, the country’s 7- to 19-year-old population is around 20 million people. If we compare this figure to the last consensus, which counted 12.6 million Iranian students, the count of children deprived of education spikes to 7.4 million!”
Despite all of the evidence, during the presidency of Hassan Rouhani and his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian regime’s education ministry never acknowledged these statistics.
Farideh Oladghobad, a member of the education and research commission in the Iranian regime’s parliament, says, “A while ago, the head of education in one of the counties of Golestan province approached us and said that they are faced with a large number of children who aren’t going to school, most of them being girls.”
Oladghobad added, “We don’t have accurate figures of the number of children who have been deprived of education across the country. For example, in Sistan and Baluchestan province, where the living conditions are harsh, our estimates are 100,000 uneducated children, but we don’t know if the other provinces are worse or not.”
According to the Iranian regime’s constitution, the government is responsible for providing quality education to all Iranian children, but the MP lays the blame at the feet of the people themselves, adding that the regime will be ratifying new regulations to penalize families who don’t send their children to school, not taking into account that a large portion of the population is living in substandard conditions and are struggling to make ends meet.
This will provide the Iranian regime with yet another excuse to tax the people and empty their pockets of their last rials.
According to the statistics provided by international bodies and the Iranian opposition, the Iranian regime spends a nearly $16-25 billion on the war in Syria, where it is struggling to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad against opposition forces. This amount alone is more than enough to pay for the educational expenses of students in Iran and to renovate schools across the country.
According to a recent report by the state-run Mehr newspaper, there are 32,000 primary schools for more than 4 million students across the country, and 300,000 educational personnel are working in these schools. Many of the buildings of these schools are so decayed that they might collapse or cave-in, Mehr warns.
This is just a glimpse of the crimes that the Iranian regime is committing against the people of Iran. As far as the people are concerned, they’ve made it clear that their miseries, including their children’s lack of access to proper education, will only end when the mullahs’ regime is gone, a fact they’ve made clear in their ongoing protests across the country where they are chanting slogans against the regime in its entirety.
