With limited access to the Islamic Republic, it is perhaps not surprising that Iran watchers routinely turn to that country’s textbooks as ciphers for understanding the effects of the regime’s efforts to produce the New Islamic Citizen. More often than not, the conclusions that emerge from these investigations confirm what many already presume to know about Iran: that the regime is successfully indoctrinating young Iranians with its brand of militant and anti-western Islam.

It doesn’t take much effort to see that the efficacy of the IRI’s school system has been over stated. The wave of protests that swept the country in the wake of the 2009 presidential election demonstrated that many, if not most of Iran’s student population, have their own ideas as to what counts as a “good Muslim,” ideas that increasingly diverge from the interests of the state. Indeed, no less a figure than Iran’s Supreme Leader has condemned the schools for failing to serve the needs of the regime, even going so far as to accuse his Ministry of Education in 2006—well before the rise of the Green Movement—of running a school system that was little different from the “anti-religious” and “West struck” outfit that operated under the Shah.

One reason that the scholarship exaggerates the impact of textbooks on students is because researchers tend to impose an unnatural coherence to the curriculum by drawing their conclusions from a historically narrow set of textbooks, taking what is effectively a single snapshot in time of the history of post-revolutionary schooling in Iran.

Reports such as those recently put out by the Israel-based Center for Monitoring of the Impact of Peace (CMIP) and Freedom House treat the changes made to Iranian schoolbooks in the aftermath of the 1979 Revolution as complete, cogent, and final—in effect transforming the curriculum and the textbooks into static and “sacred” objects with transitive properties that can be carried across the entire post-revolutionary period.

Through our lens we see that schooling in Iran is above all a highly politicized, contingent, and contested institution. Educational planners wish to produce the perfect Islamic society; they just haven’t been able to reach a consensus as to what the content or form of that idealized society ought to be.

Take for example the concept of Islamic modesty. As an illustration of Islamicization following the Revolution, Hamid Dabashi, a professor at Columbia University, points to the opening lesson of the First Grade Farsi primer. There, the classroom teacher in the prerevolutionary version is transformed from a young woman wearing a tight-fitting sweater and skirt to a more decorous (if less sexy) instructor outfitted with a plain baggy dress.

Dabashi ends his analysis there even though other variations on Islamic dress existed at the same time and in other parts of the IRI’s curriculum. The ensemble of a simple headscarf and unadorned blouse and skirt was considered monaseb or appropriate enough for a classroom teacher welcoming her students or a mother dropping her son off on his first day of elementary school in the Second Grade Farsi textbook. By 1982 this look was out for the teacher, her scarf replaced by a snug maghnaeh placed over a nondescript dress. It was only in 1987, a full eight years after the Revolution, that illustrators rectified the situation by pouring a black chador over the woman’s figure.

Around the time that the wayward mom was getting her makeover Iran’s curriculum was entering its most strident phase.  In general the late 1980s represents the apogee of what might be called schooling’s “arc of Islamicization.”  Textbook images become militant and harsh in ways not seen even during the peak of the Cultural Revolution.

Ayatollah Khomeini, who up until then was mostly absent from the textbooks, was inserted for the first time into the front matter of the textbooks, occupying the space previously reserved f or the Shah and the royal family.  The smallest detail was not overlooked:  the dog in the poster from the opening lesson of the First Grade Farsi textbook disappears in the 1987 edition, presumably because of religious prohibitions against dogs as unclean ( najes ) animals, leaving the young girl to point at an empty country road.

This period did not last long, and by the early 1990s the textbooks were already riding the downward slope of the arc.  The chanting young militants on the back cover were replaced by a more mundane safety message (“Kids be careful!”) and accompanied by cautionary images of children engaged in dangerous shenanigans, including playing with knives and sticking a hand into a meat grinder.  Khomeini remained in the front of the textbooks, but was now transformed from the figure of the stern revolutionary into the kindly grandfather of the nation.

In recent years an equilibrium seems to have been reached between two concepts.  Today artifacts from the Islamic and pre-Islamic nation are redolent and (literally) sit without problem or complication next to each to other in the textbooks.  An example of reconciliation can be found on the very first page of the current First Grade Farsi textbook.  Here we see a scene of a family reading together in their apartment.  Clearly visible in the bookshelf in the corner of the picture books containing the epic poems of Iran’s national poets, including the Divan of  Hafez, Sa’adi’s Golestan , and Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh , as well as copies of the Koran and Imam Ali’s Naj al-Balagha .  Visible on the wall behind the family is a framed picture of the ruins at Persopolis.

In the end, textbooks may be more useful as symptoms of politics in Iran than as measures of indoctrination.  Research on the ground and in the classroom by scholars such as the Iranian sociologist Mohammad Rezaei indicates that most students in Iran use textbooks to do well on tests, and above all to prepare for the university entrance exam, the dreaded konkur .  Children take away from the material only those facts that will ensure their academic success.  For all of the attention that textbooks receive by outside observers, it is quite likely that they are the last place we ought to look to determine the success or failure of the state’s hegemonic project.

Two days after the hanging of five Iranian Kurds in Tehran, protesters gathered across the Iraqi border in the Kurdish city of Suleymanieh. Thousands of them crowded into the city’s leafy Freedom Park, where Javad Alizadeh, a well-known former political prisoner in Iran who had recently left for Iraqi Kurdistan, addressed the gathering. The Iranian regime “follows neither the principles of republicanism, nor does it abide by holy laws of Islam,” Alizadeh declared. “The Islamic Republic has shown in the past 30 years that it only cares about its own survival and it will not abstain from committing the vilest of acts in achieving its goal.”

The memorial was one of the greatest outpourings of Kurdish opposition to the regime in recent memory, and one among numerous protests and hunger strikes — quiet ones in Iran, less so in Iraq’s Kurdish region, where Kurds were once persecuted but now enjoy relative autonomy — that have broken out since the execution on May 9. The victims, the Iranian authorities claimed, were activists for Kurdish autonomy; two of the five were accused of belonging to the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), a Kurdish nationalist group that Iran considers a terrorist organization. The uproar has prompted, and been worsened by, the government’s refusal to allow the families of the five victims to be buried publicly, for fear of massive protests.

The executions and other crackdowns in Iran have set up a bind for the country’s Kurds, who increasingly fear that the price of political activism within Iran is death or imprisonment — but worry that their abilities to pressure the regime will be lessened if they instead choose exile in northern Iraq, where the Kurds enjoy protection by their own defense forces. Since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005, religious and ethnic minorities have faced worsening discriminatory practices in Iran, the Kurds (who are also mostly Sunni Muslim in majority Shiite Iran) among them. When human rights and political activists have protested the unequal status, the Islamic Republic has prosecuted many of them. Most recently, Kaweh Ghassemi-Kermanshahi, a member of the central committee of the Kurdistan Human Rights Organization, was arrested after he spoke to the foreign media; he has been in detention for nearly 100 days.

The demonstrators in Suleymaniah hope their protests and vigils will inspire the Kurds in Iran to rise up, despite their fear of Iran’s security forces. (They succeeded last Thursday, when Iranian Kurds responded by launching a general strike and shuttering their shops.) Salahaddin Mohtadi, an exiled Iranian Kurd in Suleymaniah who has been fighting for Kurdish independence in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution, believes that Iran’s recent actions could be the goad that activists need to form a broad Kurdish front that transcends political rivalries. “The execution of political prisoners can be a great opportunity to create a large coalition among Kurdish parties against the central government of Iran,” he said.

On the evening of May 10, hundreds of Iranian and Iraqi Kurds took part in a protest gathering at the Shneh Dari Park in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, where demonstrators lit candles in memory of Sunday’s victims. Farhad Pirbal, a dissident Kurdish author who spoke at the event, compared what is happening now in Iran to the repression of Iraqi Kurds under Saddam Hussein. “There was a time when Baathist agents executed young Kurds right here in the neighborhood just because they were carrying cassette tapes with Kurdish music on them,” Pirbal said. “But now, we are here at this very place in freedom protesting against a regime that hangs Kurds for the crime of defending their own rights.”

“No dictatorship can last forever,” he went on. “There was a time when the demise of the Baath regime seemed impossible. … I am sure that there will be a day when the Iranian people will be free of dictatorship and achieve liberty.”

Life in the Kurdish provinces in Iran, meanwhile, remains tense. There is a heavy security presence in places such as Kamyaran, Sanandaj, Mahabad, and Saghez, and local Kurdish media reported that 15 students were arrested Wednesday morning in the Kurdish city of Marivan. Thursday’s strike in the region was reportedly the largest in recent years; bazaars were empty, students and activists stayed home, even government offices were closed. These five executions, the activists believe, don’t just mark the end of the victims’ lives, but also the beginning of a new era in which the Iranian regime will have to answer to its critics.