A Systematic Review of the Critiques and Problems of Fundamental Reform Document of Education in the Islamic Republic of Iran

1. Introduction

              The occurrence of the Islamic Revolution in the late 1970s in Iran was the beginning of extensive changes in various social dimensions. One of the influential fields that witnessed changes in all its dimensions from the very beginning of the victory days of the revolution was the formal education system. As the most important institution for the implementation of the country's educational policies and programs, this system includes more than 14.5 million students, 950 thousand teachers, and 107 thousand schools and dozens of affiliated institutions. During more than four decades, many changes have occurred in the policy-making, executive and educational levels of this system. At the policy-making level, institutions such as the Supreme Council of Education, the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution, the State, and Iran’s Islamic Parliament approved many rules and regulations in the form of documents, programs, and directives mandated the Ministry of Education to implement them. In this regard, after holding various meetings and debates, in a period of thirty years, the " Fundamental Reform Document of Education (FRDE) in the Islamic Republic of Iran" (hereafter FRDE) - as the most important formal educational document of the country to provide a deep & fundamental, all-round transformation, systematic, forward-looking, and appropriate to the Iranian-Islamic culture, was prepared and compiled (Navid Adham, 2011). This document has been approved by Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution in 2011 under the headings of generalities, statement of values, statement of mission, vision, macro goals, macro strategies, operational goals and solutions & institutional framework, and executive system and was sent to the Ministry of Education for implementation. In reviewing and explaining the situation of the FRDE, we briefly refer to the following points:

• The FRDE is a reference for structural changes in the educational system with regard to the 20-Year National Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran,
• The FRDE is the benchmark for making basic decisions in various subject of the educational system (curriculum, school management, teacher recruitment, etc.),
• The FRDE is the main guide for adopting macro and micro policies, and
• The FRDE is the main reference for national, regional and local educational planning (Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution, 2011).

           Also, six sub-systems of educational leadership & management, curriculum, teacher training & provision of human resources, provision & allocation of financial resources, space, equipment & technology, and research & evaluation have been determined in the in the FRDE. Each of these sub-systems has an essential role in realizing the goals of the educational system. The contribution of the implementation solutions of each subsystem is shown in Figure 1:

Figure 1. Seven sub-systems of the FRDE along with the quantitative contribution of each sub-system

             According to the authors' point of view, these six sub-systems are defined as the main pillars of the FRDE, relying on the Islamic Republic's formal education philosophy. It is also stated in the theoretical foundations of the FRDE: "The relation between main components and subsystems is a systematic and interconnected relationship, and each of the subsystems, according to its domain, duties and functions, has a direct relationship with some components of formal and general education and indirect connection with some other components" (Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution, 2011: 2). Thus, the management of each of the sub-systems is under the responsibility of the various deputies and affiliated organizations of the Ministry of Education. For example, currently, the subsystem of "Educational Management and Leadership " is under the leadership of the deputy of Education, the "Financial " subsystem is under the management of the deputy of Resource Development & Support, the "Space, Equipment & Technology " subsystem is under the authority of the School Renovation & Equipping Organization deputy, the "Evaluation & Research" subsystem under the management of the Institute of Educational Research, the "Curriculum " subsystem is under the responsibility of the Educational Research & Planning Organization, and the "Teacher training & Human Resource " subsystem is under the responsibility of the Human Resource Training Center and Farhangian University (Mazaheri, 2011; Haj Forosh, Behbahani & Ismailzadeh , 2012). Naturally, at the stage of the implementation of the document, this division of duties requires cohesion and integration between different actors inside and outside the Ministry of Education.

          Considering the privileged position of the FRDE, during the last decade, many politicians of the Islamic Republic of Iran have emphasized the necessity of implementing and realizing its goals. Despite this aspiration, in the scene of the action, there is a noticeable gap between what was approved and what happened. In fact, although more than a decade has passed since the notification of the document to the Ministry of Education, the way and how to implement it has always been the subject of discussion between legislators, executives and various researchers. In this regard, in the second part of the Chapter 8 of the document, the task of "updating, revising, and presenting a report on its implementation progress and how the Ministry of Education works" is assigned to the "Supreme Council of Education" (Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution, 2011, p. 60).

          Also, the third part of the Chapter 8 of FRDE approves and emphasizes the process of repairing the document in 5-year intervals. In addition, the evaluation of the status of the document - from the point of view of its restoration and updating - was re-emphasized by the approval of a single article in 2020 by the Supreme Council of Education. In this article, it is recommended to adopt a "combined approach" in document evaluation. This combined approach includes the following three sub-approaches:

• Reform-oriented approach: trying to reduce ambiguous parts in the document, increasing transparency and correcting sentences and words with multiple interpretations,

• Executive approach: based on the adoption of executive measures and groundwork to facilitate and establish the goals of FRDE

• Future-oriented and complementary approach: Paying attention to updating transformational policies and new needs and conditions.

           The background of the approval process of the FRDE shows that in its preparation, the authors focused their main attention on the role of Islam, Qur'an’s lessons, and the macro policies of the country - in other upstream documents such as the “20-Year National Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran”, “Five-Year Economic, Social & Cultural Development Plan” and “The Comprehensive Scientific Map of Iran”. Based on this, the Supreme Council of Education has obliged all managers and teachers of the country - at different executive levels - as well as many institutions, ministries and organizations - to use their maximum efforts and cooperation to achieve the goals of the FRDE. Naturally, in this direction, the educational system - as the main implementer of the document - may face obstacles and challenges. These obstacles and challenges can have an internal origin and arise from the restrictions governing the document or the educational system, or they can have an external origin and be affected by the negative effects of other national or international systems (Akhlaghi, Saleh Sadekpour & Navid Adham, 2020).

          However, more than a decade has passed since the approval and implementation of the FRDE, while there are fundamental concerns regarding the realization of its goals. In fact, the realization of the goals of the FRDE and its implementation – same as other macro policy - depends on meeting special conditions and providing supplies in the stage of formulation and implementation. Otherwise, the executives will have problems in the action stage and the realization of the goals will face many challenges. In this regard, the people involved in the document have also faced many issues, problems and challenges during this period of time, in such a way that the General Director of the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution, Mohammadi (2020), announced that after six years since the notification of the implementation of the FRDE, only 30% of it has been implemented. Also, the estimates of the Research Center of the Islamic Parliament of Iran have also shown serious delays in the implementation of the document and many disputes between the implementing agencies during the last decade (Education & Culture Studies Office, 2019 a, b). In addition, the said center has concluded that with the completion of more than half of the 14-year period for the implementation of the document - and considering the existing conditions of the country - there is no guarantee of its full implementation.

             Considering what has been said, the main problem of the present research can be considered to be the identification of criticisms and issues of the FRDE. These cases show the possibility of scientific examination of the research problem in three different areas: the first area is focused on the existence of criticisms and issues and challenges that marked the content of the FRDE. For example, the findings of Rahbari, Belbasi & Gharbi (2015) show that in the document, the emphasis on the concept of Islamic identity (according to the frequency of words) is three times more than the emphasis on concepts such as Iranian identity and modern identity. Also, according to Hemtifar and Ahanchian (2013), the educational philosophy governing the FRDE suffers from word and conceptual incompatibility. Yadolahi, Zarei & Yavari (2019) also believe that the document is ambiguous in explaining gender needs and the role of each gender. The second area is focused on the existence of criticisms, issues and challenges that show the status of the FRDE in the implementation stage. For example, in the State budget, no budget line has been allocated for the implementation of the FRDE and different states have not determined to implement it (Molavi, 2020). Also, the level of knowledge of teachers about the concepts and contents of the FRDE is lower than the average (Mohammadi, Hosni & Mohammadi, 2019). Nazarpour, Norouzian & Maleki (2018) also found that there is no logical balance between the goals of FRDE and the space and equipment of schools. In addition, Salsabili (2016) shows that in the FRDE as well as the “National Curriculum Document of Islamic Republic of Iran “the issue of environment is not given enough attention. According to Hosseini (2015), in terms of policy-making and decision-making, the authors of the FRDE have not given much value to the role of the family system or does not have a specific and clear standpoint regarding subjects such as art & music education, English language, and democracy and citizenship education (Farastkhah & Hosni, 2017; Moulai Arani, 2016; Keshavarz & Quaidi, 2015).

            In a brief summary of what has been said, it can be concluded that the FRDE, like many of the strategic documents of the country - which in various stages of preparation, approval and implementation sometimes has problems, failures, stops or dead ends -, probably encountered problems and obstacles. Although this point seems obvious based on the common experience of all those involved in the FRDE, it has never been examined in the form of a coherent scientific framework - which can take all opinions into consideration and provide a relatively comprehensive insight -. Based on this, the main goal of the current study is to find out what are the most important criticisms and problems of the FRDE, considering the passage of a decade since its approval. It is necessary to say at the end of this introduction and to create mental unity about the words that in the present research, “criticism” means knowing the merits and demerits of the FRDE from the point of view of different researchers and experts - regardless of whether these opinions are the findings of a research or output of the speaker's experiences, knowledge and personal perspective. Also, in the current research, the word of “problem” mainly refers to the cases that the researchers have presented their proposed solutions while explaining it.

2. Research Method

        This study was a qualitative, non-experimental, applied, and systematic review research. Systematic review has two main features: First, high reliability and reproducibility, and second, multi-step process. In the present research, the systematic study framework provided by Kitchenham & Charters (2007) was used. According to this approach, the review process is carried out in three stages: "review design", "resource review" and "report compilation". According to this definition, the purpose of the research was not necessarily to express specific critical views based on a school of thought or a scientific theory about the FRDE, but rather to narrate all the voices that are heard about the whole document or its different parts in a certain period of time and different ways. The research population includes all the sources that were published in the period of 2010-2019 in various formats (books, articles, conferences and conventions, research reports of institutions and organizations, interviews and roundtables published in the mass media, and academic theses). According to the goals and method of the research, the following steps were taken to determine the sample size (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The process of verification, review and final selection of research sample

           Since the systematic review is an observational research in which the researcher examines the data in previous studies, its analysis method is based on the secondary analysis of the primary data (Cheng & Philips 2014). In this research, additional in-depth analysis was used to analyze the data. Also, the researchers tried to increase the credibility of the data by using two methods: First, determining the qualitative criteria. These include the degree of expertise of the authors, the tacit and experiential knowledge of the authors, researchers and speakers, determining the presence or absence of scientific judgments and professional viewpoints. The results of this method can be seen according to the type of source in Table 1. Second, the review of findings and revision obtained through joint meetings with the research team, a number of experts of the Supreme Council of Education and experts in the research topic (Table 1).

Table 1: Potential quality of knowledge sources in studies of the FRDE

Table 2: Validity and Reliability of the research

3. Findings

           First) Introduction of Sources

               Before presenting the findings, it is necessary to provide brief information about the selected sources. After determining the research population, selecting the sample in the manner of "maximum presence of sources" and attention to the selection criteria, the selected sources are introduced according to the type of work (Table 3):

Table 3: Frequency of selected sources by type of work

             As the data in Table 3 shows the highest percentage of selected sources have been published in the form of articles in periodicals. This situation shows that before the publication of each article, people in the role of responsible manager, editor, editorial board members and referees have reviewed and evaluated its content. Articles published in conferences are also affected by this trend. In this way, it can be said that about 60% of the findings of the selected sources in the current research have been evaluated and judged by a person or persons before publication, and their relative validity can be guaranteed. Also, the data shows that since the approval of the FRDE (2011), the interest of various researchers in evaluating it has gone through an upward trend. This process has reached its peak during the two years of 2015 and 2019 - when, according to the rule and regulation, the five-year evaluation of the document must take place.

Second) Critiques of FRDE

           Analyzing the data reveals that thematic criticisms of the FRDE can be divided into 8 groups or general social, cultural, political, religious, organizational, scientific and educational dimensions. These criticisms are extracted from the findings of 47 sources (Table 4).

Table 4: Frequency of repetition of criticisms on the document according to dimensions and components