With the so-called ‘Cultural Revolution’ which took place between 1980 and 1983, the Iranian regime tried to purge the country’s academic world of Western and non-Islamic influences. At that time, the regime used extreme violence to take over the university campuses. Following this decision, many of the country’s prominent academics left the country and the result is that today, we are seeing Iran as one of the countries with the highest brain drain.
On September 13, the state-run daily Salamat news confirmed the regime’s decision to eliminate the academic structure of the country. They wrote, “The issue of the escape of brains and elites has now reached mass migration of doctors and medical staff. According to statistics, 160 cardiologists have migrated in the last year. In the same period, 30,000 medical staff applied for a certificate of good average from the faculties of medical sciences, whose destination was Oman. Also, 16,000 general doctors have emigrated from the country in the last four years.”
It seems that this was not enough for the regime in destroying the most valuable resource of the country, which is its specialists and intellectuals. Recently, the regime’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has decided to hand over the libraries of the intellectual development center for children and teenagers to the country’s public libraries.
This is following the regime’s major plan to inject its intellectual, ideological, and political principles into the content created for children and teenagers.
Publicizing this news, the regime called the libraries of the country ‘public, non-governmental, coordinated with the Islamic principles and influent on the society’ and announced that children and teenagers are at the center of the ‘major policies’ of the regime.
The latest statistics of the reading time per capita for 2020, as announced by the regime’s Ministry of Culture, is two minutes. This indicates that the regime’s plan is nothing more than an injustice to the children of Iran, erasing the opportunity for them to have access to books and libraries.
The regime’s Ministry of Culture suggested this plan according to Article 1 of the law on the establishment and management of public libraries in the country. This dictates that the establishment, construction, equipping, development, management, and supervision of the country’s libraries should be under the supervision of the Public Libraries Institution.
This is despite the libraries of Astan Quds Razavi, the Shrine of Hazrat Masoumeh, the Shrine of Hazrat Abdol Azim, Shahcheragh, National Library, the Ayatollah Marashi Najafi Library, the Islamic Council Library, and other appropriative libraries, being exempt from this law.
The regime has ridiculously claimed that libraries for children are not profitable and are harmful to the country’s economy.
The profitability of a cultural and educational center, such as a library, can never be measured by commercial criteria and perspective. The profitability of libraries and cultural centers, especially for children, in any country will show itself in the promotion of the next generation.
In addition, we should mention that the current high prices of books have brought educational resources out of the reach of most Iranian children. Families even have problems purchasing notebooks for their children, as the price of a single notebook has increased from 60,000 rials to 150,000 rials.
