Consensus à la Beutelsbach – A Minimum for Iran?

The Beutelsbach Consensus of 1976 was never adopted: it is Hans-Georg Wehling’s gleanings from a dispute between hostile camps, and it regulates only how teachers deal with students – no overwhelming, what is controversial must appear as controversial, and students must be enabled to judge for themselves. On its fiftieth anniversary, this essay asks what the three sentences could mean for Iran, whose schools have been a place of overwhelming under both regimes and which stands on the threshold of a political transition. It reads the education chapter of the Iran Prosperity Project’s “Emergency Phase” plan, which invokes the denazification of German schools, and sets against it the later German answer: a procedural rule in place of the ideological screening of teachers. The limits are discussed as well: the missing public sphere, the lack of backing for teachers, and an older, cultural difficulty. English translation of the German original; the German and a Persian version are published as separate records.