Last week, Iran banned the teaching of foreign languages ??in kindergartens and schools, including English and Arabic, which until now had some presence. The measure was immediately applicable. Masud Tehrani Farjad, a senior official at the Ministry of Education, explains in the media the reasons that have pushed them to make this decision: “The teaching of foreign languages ??is prohibited in nurseries, kindergartens and primary schools because it is at those ages. when the Iranian identity is formed.”
So now the only language that will be taught will be Persian, which many people here now call Farsi, as if it were more complicated; Just as there are those who call Basque Basque, as if that gave it a more combative status. In any case, in Iran, pure and simple monolingualism so that the Iranians of the future can walk straight. Nothing that those of us who grew up in schools and institutes that educated us with the Formation of the National Spirit that has been so useful to us in life do not know.
In 1933, the French poet and essayist Régis Messac published a very interesting book entitled À bas le latin!, in which he criticized a lot of things that he did not like about education: the teaching methods, the exhaustion of students due to excessive work (and extracurricular activities 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 phrase – “every individual risks forgetting his own language if he tries to learn others” – that could now be signed by the Iranian Government, which intends that, during the first years of life, children in its country only learn Persian or Farsi or whatever the hell you have to say, because maybe one day they will tell us that they have given it another name.
