"The waste of a generation of Iranian youth"

Iran's domestic crisis: Its youth

by Elahe Enssani from 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.