[Mb-civic] FW: Javanan-e- Iran ra daryabid

[Golsorkhi]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 17:38:41 -0500
Subject: Fwd: Javanan-e- Iran ra daryabid



Please note the attached slide presentation and pass this on.

Mideast Overtures - Iran's Domestic Crisis: It¹s Youth

  December 28, 2004
  Elahe Enssani
San Francisco Chronicle

  An impending danger is haunting Iran. While an intense debate, both
domestic and international, has been carried out in the past year over
the Iranian nuclear program, another issue that merits even more
attention is being ignored: the waste of a generation of Iranian youth.
This tragedy merits our attention because of the human resource being
squandered.

  Last July, the Research and Planning Institute for Higher Education,
an Iranian government agency, conducted research on Iranian youth. The
project focused on young Iranians with an average age of 21. The
results are alarming: 53 percent of the participants see death as a way
out of their lives and more than 77 percent believe there is no future
for them. While one would expect further analysis and research in order
to better understand the issues and to come up with solutions, few
public debates have made it their central focus.

  Where will this hopelessness of Iranian youth lead? How will this
affect the hopes for a democratic future of the country? We all know
that apathy precludes participation and empowerment, the two essential
building blocks of democracy.

  When you actually talk to Iranian youth as I have, you get a sense of
their emotions, which are much like their western counterparts. You
also see that their aspirations are depressingly absent. I've visited
the neighborhoods and parks where I spent my teenage years, and I've
spoken to many young people in order to compare how they feel in
contrast to my own generation. While they have trouble identifying the
future, they are not rejecting their past, nor are they denying the
importance of Islamic values to their identity. But I've realized this
is a generation that for the most part is being overlooked and, even
worse, abandoned.

  The Iranian government has not invested in the country's youth in
terms of instilling leadership qualities or a sense of mission and
aspirations by providing equal opportunities. In the 1970s, people in
the United States talked about the "me" generation. In Tehran in the
1970s, people talked about the children of the shah's generation, in
whom some of the oil money was invested. Many of us were sent to the
best European and U.S. universities to receive higher education and
return to take the country to the "gates of the great civilization."
Even when Iranian intellectuals  made fun of the pretentiousness of
this ideal, such an investment made tremendous good sense. Working
toward creating a great civilization resonated with a sense of
idealism, mission and purpose.

  Today's youth are different. They are without ideals or role models
such as intellectuals, artists, poets, scientists or anyone who has
excelled at something. They have no spokesperson.

  The poems they recite and the literature they read are the ones my
generation recited and read. Their sources of inspiration are a
generation old! This is a generation that is apathetic about its
leaders, and none of the many I interviewed aspires to lead the country
one day. Most important, this is a generation that does not have a
sense of national pride and identity. At a time when nationalism and a
sense of national purpose are on the rise throughout the world -- from
China and India to Brazil -- Iran stands out as one of the great
civilizations whose destiny is ignored by its own people.

  One university professor, who had studied in Germany and is now
teaching in Tehran, compared Iran's young people to the German youth
directly after World War II. He explained that the same hopelessness,
sense of shame and lack of national pride had crippled that generation
of Germans for years.

  Iranian youth are an untapped resource who comprise more than 60
percent of the population -- perhaps a greater asset than the natural
wealth of the nation.

  If we care about the future of democracy in Iran, what should be done?
The United States should encourage Iran's leaders to invest in that
nation's youth in the following ways:

  -- Acknowledge that the apathy crisis among Iranian youth exists. This
may seem trivial to Americans, but it is really an important step, yet
not taken. The conservative domestic media portray Iranian youth as
happy, hopeful and committed to the Islamic ideals of the nation's
leaders. But this oversimplification is far from the truth.

  -- Shift the emphasis from religious values and traditional beliefs to
individual freedom and to values that relate to their Persian identity.
In other words, let the young be young and discover life for
themselves.

  -- Channel some of Iran's surging oil wealth into the basic needs of
the younger generation. One simple issue stressed by the young people I
talked to was the lack of youth centers and other places where they
could socialize outside of family gatherings.

  -- Finally, instill a sense of hopefulness by creating a level playing
field in job opportunities and financial self-sufficiency.

  Investing in the nation's youth would be a much more secure path to
greatness than a nuclear program.

Elahe Enssani is chair of civil engineering at San Francisco State
University. A documentary film of the interviews she conducted in Iran
is in post production.

 

 


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