" Education industry" An analytical review of Iran's educational system

This essay is an attempt to explore “success discourse” in educational system in Iran. The consequence of “success discourse” is a phenomenon I have called “Education Industry” following Theodore Adorno’s “Cultural Industry. In particular, I aim to address two questions related to the above mentioned “success discourse”. First, how success can be evaluated, and second, how social goals can be achieved based on the success. To provide an answer to these questions I have conducted a study on educational process. The results indicate that the mentioned “success discourse” is widespread among schools educational management and some fundamental problems are emerged accordingly. Firstly, major attention to natural sciences like mathematics, chemistry and the like, and minor attention to human sciences has resulted in the number of physicians and engineers outnumber humanities and art thinkers. Secondly, the arts and entertainment are deleted or neglected by the school program managers. Thirdly, as a result of this discourse the students look to result more than the learning as a process. Thus they don’t learn how, just learn what. Their experiences cannot be rich and they don’t understand the issues in their holistic form. In this condition, some profit-driven centers, in the name of educational activities, try to replace the national education system, while they don’t add much value to the learning process.