October 14, the 22nd of Mehr in the Iranian calendar, marks the anniversary of the tragic deaths of the late Dariush Mehrjui and his wife, the accomplished artist Vahideh Mohammadifar. Mehrjui was an outstanding filmmaker who undoubtedly created many enduring works in the history of Iranian cinema. He also co-wrote the screenplays of several films from the final years of his life with his wife.
On this occasion, I would like to revisit one of his earliest films made after the Iranian Revolution, The School We Used to Go which Mehrjui directed in 1980, based on Fereydoun Doostdar’s book The Backyard of Adl Afaq School. The film was banned because of certain ambiguities surrounding its content and was not released until ten years later, following the remarkable success of Mehrjui’s Hamoun. Unfortunately, it failed to attract much attention from audiences or critics. Yet because it was made just two years after the Revolution, it also possesses historical significance, offering a glimpse into the atmosphere of Iranian schools during the early revolutionary years.
The film tells the story of a school whose principal has fallen ill, leaving Mr. Pazouki, the vice principal responsible for discipline, in charge. Pazouki runs the school through intimidation, bullying, humiliation, and an irrational obsession with order, eventually provoking the students to stand up against him. In this article, I want to examine the film from an educational perspective. Consider this line spoken by Mr. Pazouki to the students: “Adl Afaq School is here to turn you into proper human beings, gentlemen! Human beings!”
The school chosen as the film’s setting is a building of traditional Iranian architecture, with magnificent columns and two courtyards. Several principal characters inhabit this environment: the school’s disciplinarian vice principal; Kaveh, a student who gradually assumes leadership of his classmates; the absent principal, who is ill; the librarian, who also serves as the school’s accountant and office administrator; the literature teacher, who supervises the school’s wall newspaper and challenges the vice principal; the other teachers; the school caretaker; the majority of students; and a small minority of privileged students who act as informants and enjoy special treatment.
During the opening minutes, we enter a classroom where the geography teacher has failed to appear, and the students have turned the room upside down. When the vice principal enters, the class monitor is the first to receive his anger. With considerable fury and authority, Pazouki shouts: “Quietly! All of you, go into the backyard! The inspector is visiting classrooms on this very floor, while you’ve been making all this racket!”
All this happens within the film’s first four minutes, immediately suggesting that we are watching a work with several layers of meaning. The traditional Iranian architecture is significant. The tall columns may symbolize the antiquity and grandeur of a cultural heritage. Maps of Iran hang both in the classrooms and in the principal’s office. In a corner of the courtyard, the school library occupies a basement. Here, we encounter a striking contrast between the impressive building, the spacious courtyard, and the library hidden underground.
Mehrjui also introduces another visual contradiction: students exercising in the school’s front courtyard while an elderly, impatient, and irritable man sits in the basement, occupied with accounts and paperwork, almost like a prisoner.
In the chaotic classroom, even the student assigned to maintain order contributes to the disorder. Eventually, the children quietly move into the backyard. The inspector, the vice principal, the class monitor, and the students all become symbolic figures within the school, which Mehrjui presents as a miniature society.
It is a society that, in Mehrjui’s vision, can descend into chaos when people suddenly find themselves with an opportunity to act freely. Even those who simply mind their own business may suffer the consequences. But is this disorder not the result of people having been denied freedom and the right to make choices for so long? When freedom arrives, whether deliberately granted or unexpectedly acquired, do they know what to do with it?
Heroes and leaders are few. Alongside them, and sometimes outnumbering them, is a small group of opportunists connected to those in authority. Everyone else waits to see what will happen. The disciplinarians of society, its administrators and enforcers, must answer to the inspectors, those who judge their performance.
In the absence of Mr. Rahbar, the school principal, who is ill, events unfold without his knowledge. The vice principal considers himself the supreme authority and imposes a rigid, humiliating system of discipline, inventing harsh and arbitrary regulations. He issues orders that have no legitimate place in an educational institution intended for children.
His behavior makes the students increasingly suspicious of him, to the point that they begin observing even his private life. Meanwhile, flatterers and opportunists feed the flames of his authority, intensifying the students’ resentment.
The class monitor, supposedly responsible for maintaining order, occupies an ambiguous position between the administration and the ordinary students. In practice, he has little genuine authority. His attempts to control the classroom fail, and eventually he too becomes part of the growing disorder.
Kaveh, the film’s young hero, discovers that he can become effective only when he turns to a means of public communication. This medium may be theater or the school’s wall newspaper. Influenced by an intellectual and literary ideal, Kaveh possesses a charismatic personality.
When the imposed and unjust system of discipline proves incapable of maintaining its authority, Kaveh discovers the power of writing. Through the written word, he can lead the students, and with the support of figures within the school establishment, particularly the literature teacher and the librarian, meaningful change becomes possible. Unity becomes the key to victory, and the outcome offers hope.
Another important layer of the film concerns the frustration produced by a culture of unquestioning obedience. The school reflects a hierarchical system in which the vice principal exercises absolute power in the principal’s absence, yet remains subordinate to the principal. The principal answers to the department head, the department head to the deputy director, and so on, all the way up to the minister.
Such a hierarchy produces little beyond exhaustion, humiliation, and resentment. Students are humiliated through discrimination, injustice, violence, physical punishment, threats to lower their conduct grades, and expulsion. Teachers, meanwhile, are humiliated by the expectation that they must obediently carry out the vice principal’s wishes and serve his personal objectives. All these relationships contribute to the school’s atmosphere of confusion and disorder.
The most experienced of these employees is the librarian, who works in the basement. In a revealing conversation with Kaveh, he expresses his frustration: “Oh, come on! You have no idea! We don’t even have time to read our own books, let alone Büchner. No, no, no! No Büchner, no orders, no disciplinarian, no Kazem, nothing! But why? I’ve spent my whole life obeying the commands of His Excellency, the great vice principal. Yes, sir! Certainly, sir! Yes, sir! Certainly, sir! The vice principal, the principal, the department head, the director general, the deputy minister, the minister! Obedience, sir! I’m insignificant! I’m small…!”
This attitude defines the vice principal’s relationship with everyone, whether teachers, students, the librarian, or the caretaker. For him, the ultimate purpose of education is to turn students into proper human beings, and becoming a proper human being means learning to obey. Yet the ability to make social choices requires something far greater than submission to irrational, imposed discipline.
Another layer of the film explores Mehrjui’s understanding of how an educational system might change. Although he creates a world in which the moral divisions sometimes appear almost black and white, he remains hopeful that meaningful transformation can emerge from the bottom upward.
Kaveh is an optimistic character who has read Büchner’s Woyzeck five times and believes that each reading brings him a deeper understanding. He wants to stage the play, and in this context theater and artistic expression become symbols of the preparation necessary for social change.
Around the middle of the film, we enter a surrealistic sequence in which Kaveh imagines himself confronting the vice principal in a battle. Following this imaginary struggle, he realizes that imagination alone cannot achieve his objectives. He must act.
Kaveh begins speaking to his friends about the power of the pen and writes an article for the school’s wall newspaper titled The Backyard of Adl Afaq School: “Adl Afaq School has two courtyards, a front courtyard and a backyard. In the front courtyard, everything is devoted to lessons, education, and proper upbringing. There is respect and freedom, kindness and friendship. This is the courtyard everyone can see. But the school we love has a backyard as well…”
The wall newspaper becomes an instrument of unity and solidarity. Although the vice principal continues to oppose it, his authority begins to weaken. A majority of the students, joined by some of the teachers, openly question his harsh disciplinary system. Whispers turn into shouts, and shouts become protests.
Eventually, the protest grows beyond anything the vice principal and his assistant can contain. In a humiliating reversal, they are effectively driven out of the school by the very community they once controlled. The School We Used to Go was made in 1980 and remained banned for ten years before finally reaching audiences. But what would we discover if we compared today’s schools with the fictional Adl Afaq School? My answer would be simple: we would find countless Adl Afaq Schools.
We are confronted with an educational system in which social justice has increasingly been called into question. Libraries are often relegated to basements, both physically and symbolically. The disappointment and exhaustion of teachers are visible on their faces. They have little participation in shaping policy or making decisions. They are largely expected to implement decisions imposed from above.
Consider the many different versions of Adl Afaq School that exist today: private tuition-based schools, selective schools, schools affiliated with particular institutions, schools managed by boards of trustees, public schools in affluent neighborhoods, and public schools in disadvantaged communities. These divisions have turned educational inequality into a mechanism through which humiliation and discrimination spread throughout society.
In 1980, Mehrjui addressed a complex, multilayered problem and imagined a solution through the solidarity and collective action of students. Today, however, the challenges facing Iran’s educational system have become even more complicated and deeply entrenched.
The film’s enduring significance lies not simply in its criticism of authoritarian school discipline, but in its recognition that a school can become a reflection of an entire society. Its corridors, classrooms, offices, and courtyards reveal relationships of power, obedience, privilege, exclusion, and resistance. And perhaps the most important question the film leaves us with is whether education should produce obedient individuals who follow orders without questioning them, or independent human beings capable of thinking, choosing, challenging injustice, and changing the world around them.
