Context is Everything: Environment and Education Intersections in the Rise and Fall of Iran’s Nature Schools

Abstract

This study of the rise and fall of nature schools across Iran in 2014–2019 shows the environmental and educational context of modernization during and before the Iranian Islamic Republic commenced in 1979. The account provides the historical and cultural context for understanding the nature school movement. Ecologist Hossein Vahabzadeh’s environmental entrepreneurship establishing nature schools strategically fitted these to institutional patterns of Iranian society. The later change of heart by the government, delicensing nature schools, curtailed an environmental education success story. Key discursive threads in Iranian culture, society and governance moulded the rise and course of the nature schools education initiative. Multiple intersecting causes identified continue in environmental education developments in the national education system. This outline of the social and cultural shaping of nature schools provides a basis for future scholarship to tell a fuller account. It identifies the nature school movement’s complexity, seeing beyond simple terms of good, bad or failed.