Iran’s education crisis: How US sanctions and proxy wars weaponize childhood against systemic collapse
Original framing: “Iran’s children return to school under the shadow of war” — Al Jazeera
The voices most affected by Iran’s education crisis—Baha’i children (who are systematically barred from universities), Kurdish girls in border regions (cut off from schools due to sanctions-induced poverty), and disabled students (whose assistive technologies are blocked by import restrictions)—are entirely absent from this narrative. These groups face compounded discrimination: Baha’is are denied education by the state *and* sanctioned by the US, while Kurds and disabled students lack advocacy even within Iran’s civil society. The framing here universalizes 'Iranian children' as a monolith, erasing how marginalization intersects with the crisis. Restoring these voices would reveal that the education collapse is not just about sanctions but about layered oppressions.
Iran’s education crisis is not an accident of war but the deliberate outcome of a sanctions regime designed to destabilize society by targeting its most vulnerable institutions.
The framing of children as passive victims obscures the active resistance of teachers, artists, and marginalized communities who are adapting education to survive—whether through underground schools, blockchain knowledge commons, or the revival of traditional pedagogies. Historical parallels, from Iraq to Cuba, reveal that sanctions are a repeatable tool of statecraft, one that replicates colonial patterns of educational apartheid. The solution lies not in humanitarian aid (which sanctions prevent) but in systemic resistance: decentralized hubs, union-led advocacy, and the reclamation of Indigenous knowledge as adaptive frameworks. The trickster here is the sanctions regime itself, which has turned Iran’s crisis into a performance of suffering—one that justifies its own existence while erasing the creativity and resilience of those it claims to protect.