As millions of students returned to classrooms this month, Iran’s paramilitary Basij appeared prominently in elementary schools as authorities rolled out an education campaign infused with military and ideological messaging.
Iran’s Education Ministry announced over the summer that material related to the recent war and the country’s military and nuclear capabilities would be incorporated into educational content.
The push comes at a precarious moment for the Islamic Republic, following war, economic turmoil and nationwide unrest—and four years after schoolgirls became some of the youngest and most visible participants in the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising.
“Iran is obviously right now at sort of a crossroads,” historian Arash Azizi told Iran International, as the Islamic Republic struggles to command the loyalty of generations born decades after the 1979 revolution.
“We’re talking about much younger people, people under 13,” Azizi said, adding that the Basij had some involvement in primary schools during the early years after the revolution, but considerably less in recent decades.
The memory of Woman, Life, Freedom
Historian Shahram Kholdi said the increased attention to schools cannot be separated from what happened inside them four years ago.
“We should remember that during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement we saw a huge wave of solidarity with this movement, especially in girls’ schools in Iran,” he said.
The nationwide protests in January served as another warning. “It was again a wake-up call, harkening back to Woman, Life, Freedom, that they have to control schools,” Kholdi said.
After the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in morality police custody in September 2022, protests spread into schools.
Videos showed schoolgirls removing their headscarves, chanting against the Islamic Republic and removing or defacing images of its leaders. Some were barely teenagers.
The protests turned schools into one of the most visible arenas of youth opposition to the Islamic Republic.
Kholdi argues that the significance of a Basij presence extends beyond ideological instruction. Schools can provide authorities with greater visibility into students and, through them, their families at a time of considerable social and economic discontent.
The Basij’s role in policing students also has a history. Kholdi recalled his own high-school years, when Basij members searched students’ backpacks each morning for what he described as “contraband cultural material.”
What stands out now, he said, is how far down the age ladder the attention appears to be moving.
The Islamic Republic’s concern about losing younger Iranians predates the latest unrest and war. In a January 2025 interview with Iran International, Iran specialist Holly Dagres said the establishment was already looking beyond an increasingly alienated Generation Z.
“They’ve been actually looking at the next generation, which is Gen Alpha,” she said.
‘North Korea scenario’
Azizi sees the push into younger age groups as part of a broader argument within the establishment over how to respond to a society that has moved away from some of the ideological positions that have defined the Islamic Republic.
“The regime has been trying to sort of bolster its base amongst the youth because it’s lost them and it knows they’re the future,” Azizi said.
One tendency, he said, favors a return to a more rigid and intensely ideological state—what he described as a “North Korea scenario”—drawing on mass mobilization of its remaining supporters to reinforce mandatory hijab and Islamist social rules.
In that vision, the Basij becomes an instrument not only for building support but for imposing what Azizi called “societal submission.”
But he said such an approach carries its own risk.
“If the regime wants to go toward bringing back Iran to the 1980s and then North Korea,” Azizi said, such policies could “lead to more social protests and social resistance.”
That tension is now reaching further into Iran’s classrooms.
During Woman, Life, Freedom, schoolgirls who had spent their entire lives under the Islamic Republic turned some of those classrooms into places of protest. Four years later, the children entering elementary school belong to an even younger generation.