Education Ministry reports one million students dropping out of school; unofficial figure is "five million"

A day after the acting Minister of Education announced that nearly one million students had dropped out of school due to the spread of the coronavirus, the "World of Industry" newspaper reported that the number of students dropping out has exceeded five million.

Alireza Kazemi, the acting minister of education, said at a gathering in Tehran on November 5 that "around 210,000 elementary school students and around 760,000 high school students are dropping out of school, which is a serious harm."

However, the Jahan Sanat newspaper reported in a report on the "middle class leaving schools" and quoted Ebrahim Saharkhiz, an expert on educational issues, as saying: "The dropout rate of students who do not have access to the Shad network is about three and a half million, and until school is held in person, the dropout rate of students will exceed five million."

According to Mr. Saharkhiz, "Rural families, families with abusive or unsupervised parents, and some families concerned about making a living could not afford to provide smart devices for their children, and the best place we could provide free educational and cultural services to their children was school. Therefore, students have been missing school for two years."

He called the statistics announced by the acting Minister of Education inaccurate and asked, "How did the acting Minister of Education arrive at these statistics? If the criterion is the attendance and absence statistics of students on the Shad network, then these statistics are not accurate. Because many parents are present on the Shad network instead of their children and their children are child laborers."

Despite providing various statistics about the number of students who dropped out of school due to lack of access to smart facilities in the last academic year, Behrouz Mohebi, a representative from Sabzevar, reported in April this year that 30 to 40 percent of students in several cities dropped out of school due to lack of access to educational facilities.

Mr. Mohebbi said that the internet in some villages in Iran is still 2G, while students need 3G or 4G internet to send and download videos or audio sent for education.

Last school year, several students in deprived areas of Iran committed suicide, and some of them, including Mohammad Mousavizadeh, an 11-year-old student from Bandar Diyar, Bushehr Province, attributed the suicide to their families' inability to afford a mobile phone.

Since the 2020 academic year, Iranian students have been following their curriculum at home through the Shad app due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Source: Radio Farda