Across France, angry schoolchildren have taken to the streets, protesting against crumbling classrooms, overcrowded schools, and chronic shortages of teachers. Their demonstrations reflect growing frustration with an education system struggling to meet the expectations of a new generation. Yet, as the new academic year gets underway in Iran, French pupils might be astonished to discover the scale of the educational catastrophe confronting their Iranian counterparts.
For millions of Iranian families, education has become another casualty of economic hardship, soaring inflation, and deepening poverty. The simple act of sending a child to school has become a financial ordeal. Meanwhile, the authorities remain preoccupied with ideological conformity, political surveillance, and suppressing dissent. Around 16.5 million Iranian children were expected to begin the 2026 academic year, including more than 1.15 million entering primary school for the first time. Behind these impressive figures lies a deeply troubling reality. For impoverished families, the cost of schoolbooks, stationery, uniforms, shoes, and transport can consume an impossible proportion of household income.
A basic package of school supplies now costs between 30 million ($15) and 170 million ($85) rials. One stationery retailer reported that the price of a decent notebook had more than doubled in a year, rising from 850,000 to 1.8 million rials. With much of the 90 million Iranian population struggling to survive below the international poverty line of $2.15 per day, imagine the anguish of parents forced to choose between buying food for their children and purchasing the notebooks they need to learn. Iran's constitution guarantees free education through secondary school.
Even the state-affiliated Tasnim news agency has exposed demands for payments in supposedly free public schools. In Kashan, one father reported being asked for 50 million rials to enroll his daughter. Another parent described paying 120 million rials because his child lived outside the school's designated catchment area. For the wealthy families of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders and corrupt mullahs, meanwhile, an entirely different educational universe exists. Approved private school fees can reach 2.2 billion rials annually, with transport, meals, and uniforms charged separately. Privilege buys smaller classes, additional tuition, and better opportunities. Poverty increasingly determines educational destiny.
The consequences are devastating. Official figures from September identified 141,837 primary school-aged children already outside the education system. Earlier government statistics indicated that approximately 992,000 children across primary and secondary education were out of school during the 2023 academic year. At a conference in Tehran this June, an estimate of two million working children was presented. Behind every statistic stands a child whose future is being sacrificed to economic necessity. Children who should be learning mathematics, science, and literature are instead working to supplement desperately inadequate family incomes. Others remain at home because their parents simply cannot afford the additional costs of schooling. For these families, education has ceased to be a guaranteed right and has become an increasingly expensive privilege.
The crisis extends far beyond household finances. Iran's own education minister acknowledged a shortage of approximately 90,000 teachers at the beginning of the academic year. Independent teachers' organizations estimated the deficit at between 100,000 and 130,000. Overcrowded classrooms, exhausted teachers, and declining educational standards are the inevitable consequences. The authorities propose plugging these gaps through millions of additional teaching hours, recruiting retirees, and temporary instructors. Such emergency measures may keep classrooms operating, but they offer little reassurance to parents watching their children's prospects deteriorate.
Teachers themselves face immense economic pressures. Their longstanding demands for better salaries, improved conditions, and professional dignity have repeatedly brought them into confrontation with the authorities. Education should be a national investment. Instead, teachers and pupils are struggling within a system beset by shortages and inequality. The growing educational divide has already generated protests. In June, secondary school students demonstrated across numerous Iranian cities, including Tehran, Mashhad, Shiraz, Isfahan, and Tabriz. Their anger focused on changes to university admission rules that gave greater weight to academic records. Students argued that the arrangements favored children from affluent households able to purchase private tuition and superior schooling.
Their grievance exposes a fundamental injustice. How can a teenager studying in an overcrowded classroom compete fairly with the privileged offspring of wealthy IRGC and clerical families enjoying expensive private education? Yet educational inequality represents only one dimension of the gathering storm. Iran's universities have repeatedly become centers of political dissent. Students demanding freedom, equality, and basic rights have faced disciplinary proceedings, suspensions, and expulsions. Reports earlier this year described more than 100 disciplinary cases at Iran University of Science and Technology and further proceedings involving students at Tehran and Sharif universities.
As schools reopened, cleric Reza Nouri warned that enemies were attempting to conquer Iran's educational institutions. He urged officials to cleanse the educational environment of hostile influences.
Such rhetoric reveals the profound tension between educational freedom and political control. Where students seek knowledge, opportunity, and dignity, officials increasingly speak the language of ideological discipline and security. The contrast with France is striking. French pupils protest against inadequate classrooms and teacher shortages. Iranian pupils confront those same problems alongside severe household poverty, exclusion from education, and restrictions on political expression.
The new academic year therefore carries implications extending well beyond the classroom. Rising prices, diminishing opportunities, and resentment over unequal treatment have already contributed to student demonstrations. Whether these grievances produce another sustained wave of protests remains uncertain. What is certain is that millions of Iranian families are confronting an intolerable choice between immediate survival and their children's future. A country rich in human talent and natural resources should be capable of providing every child with a decent education. Its young people deserve classrooms equipped for learning, properly supported teachers, and opportunities determined by ability rather than family wealth.
Iran's children are asking for the most elementary foundations of a dignified future. Their grievances deserve international attention, and their right to peaceful protest, educational opportunity, and freedom of expression deserves unequivocal protection. The measure of any government is the future it offers its children. In Iran, that future is increasingly being placed beyond their reach.
Struan Stevenson was a member of the European Parliament representing Scotland (1999-2014), president of the Parliament's Delegation for Relations with Iraq (2009-14), and chairman of the Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup (2004-14). He is an author and international lecturer on the Middle East.
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