Last week, Iran banned the teaching of foreign languages ??in kindergartens and schools, including English and Arabic, which until now had some presence there. The measure took immediate effect. Massud Tehrani Farjad, a senior official of the Ministry of Education, explains to the media the reasons that have pushed them to take this decision: “The teaching of foreign languages ??is prohibited in nurseries, kindergartens and primary schools because it is these ages when the Iranian identity is formed”.
So now the only language that will be taught there will be Persian, which many people here now call Farsi, as if it were more twisted; just as there are those who call the Basque Basque, as if that gave it a more combative status. In any case, in Iran, pure and hard monolingualism so that the Iranians of the future rise up. Nothing that those of us who grew up in schools and institutes that educated us with the Formación del Espíritu Nacional do not know, which has been so useful in our lives.
In 1933, the French poet and essayist Régis Messac published a book called the sea of ??interest, titled À bas le latin!, in which he criticized a lot of things he didn’t like about education: the methods of teaching, the exhaustion of students due to excessive work (and extracurriculars had not yet become fashionable), the opposition between science and literature… And the teaching of Latin, which he considered unnecessary. In the book there is a tremendous sentence – “every individual risks forgetting his own language if he tries to learn others” – which could now be signed by the Iranian Government, which intends that, during the first years of life, children of their country they only learn Persian or Farsi or whatever the hell it should be called, because maybe any day they will tell us that they have given it another name.
