The Iranian Ministry of Education on Wednesday released a list of attributes that will disqualify potential teachers, including illnesses, unattractive features, personal habits, and even speaking with “strong accents.” Many of the guidelines are aimed at excluding female teachers.
According to Kurdistan24 News, illnesses on the list include kidney stones, poor eyesight, and a history of bladder surgery. For women, they include “period disorders, too much facial hair, infertility, or breast cancer.”
The UK Daily Mail found scars, fungal infections, cross eyes, facial moles, and even “skin conditions such as acne or eczema” on the list. Radio Free Europe adds “migraines and cluster headaches.” Teachers with fewer than 20 teeth and color-blind art teachers would be prohibited.
“Smokers, people who enjoy smoking a hookah, drug users, and alcoholics are also blacklisted,” as are “people suffering from sexual dysfunction or venereal and sexual diseases, including AIDS and syphilis patients,” notes Radio Free Europe.
EuroNews reports there are hundreds of disqualifying conditions in the new Ministry of Education guidelines. The criteria are so stringent that even Iran’s state-run news agency Fars prodded the Ministry to produce “more realistic” rules. Iranian officials attempted to justify the extensive list by saying applicants for teaching positions have been spending too much time on medical testing.
After social media criticism that renowned physicist Stephen Hawking would be banned from Iranian schools under the Ministry of Education’s conditions for employment, an adviser to President Hassan Rouhani promised to investigate how the list was devised. EuroNews reports that a Ministry of Education spokesman responded by promising that “measures specifically targeting women would be removed and the rest of the list reviewed.”
Al-Monitor notes that education was a major issue in the last Iranian presidential campaign, and a source of some friction between President Hassan Rouhani, who ultimately won re-election, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Choosing an education minister proved difficult for Rouhani as the Ayatollah demanded more influence over the department.
Education went through a disastrous period of total state control in Iran after the 1979 Islamist revolution, according to Al-Monitor’s account, until many schools were successfully privatized in the 1990s. However, “the Ministry of Science and the Khamenei-controlled Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution exert significant control over universities,” with the theocratic Supreme Council having control over the screening of university board members.
A power struggle between reformists and hardliners has been raging at the Ministry of Education, which oversees primary and secondary-school education, and is portrayed by Al-Monitor as a hotbed of political favoritism and bureaucratic infighting.
A key event in the struggle over Iranian education was the death of former president Hashemi Rafsanjani in January. Although he began as a leader of the Iranian religious establishment and a protege of Ayatollah Khomeini, he eventually became more reform-minded and fell out of favor with the theocrats, who stripped him of various religious titles and blocked him from running in the 2013 presidential election. Rafsanjani was particularly active in keeping religious hardliners from gaining excessive influence over the Iranian education system.