Ministry of Education Reports One Million Students Dropping Out; Unofficial Statistics Show “Five Million”
One day after the acting head of the Ministry of Education reported that nearly one million students dropped out following the coronavirus outbreak, the newspaper “Jahan-e Sanat” (Industry World) reported that the number of students dropping out exceeds five million.
Alirezа Kazemi, acting head of the Ministry of Education, said on November 6 at a gathering in Tehran that “approximately 210,000 elementary school students and about 760,000 secondary school students are dropouts, which is a serious harm”.
However, the newspaper Jahan-e Sanat reported on “the exodus of the middle class from schools” and quoted Ibrahim Sahar-Khiz, an expert on educational issues, as saying: “The number of students dropping out who don’t have access to the Shad network is approximately three and a half million, and as long as schools don’t resume in-person classes, the number of student dropouts will exceed five million”.
According to Mr. Sahar-Khiz, “rural families, neglected or orphaned families, and some families concerned with making a living did not have the ability to provide smart devices for their children, and the best place where we could provide free educational and cultural services to their children was school. Therefore, students have lost school for two years”.
He described the figures announced by the acting head of the Ministry of Education as inaccurate and asked: “How did the acting head of the Ministry of Education arrive at these numbers? If the criterion for counting is students’ presence and absence in the Shad network, this number is not accurate. Because many parents are present in the Shad network instead of their children, and turned their children into child laborers”.
Despite the presentation of different statistics regarding the number of students who dropped out due to lack of access to smart facilities in the last academic year, Behrouz Mohabbati, representative from Sabzevar, reported in the first month of this year about 30 to 40 percent dropout rates among students in several cities due to lack of access to educational facilities.
Mr. Mohabbati had 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 files sent for educational purposes.
During the last academic year, several students in deprived areas of Iran attempted suicide, and the reason for some of these incidents, including 11-year-old student Mohammad Mousavi-zadeh from Bandar Dair in Bushehr Province, was attributed to the family’s inability to afford a mobile phone.
Iranian students have been following their school programs through the Shad application at home since the 2020-2021 academic year due to the coronavirus outbreak.
Source: Radio Farda
