Education: Institution or Organization? A Dialogue with Saeed Ghapanvari, a Distinguished Scholar

Chahardoli:
The institution of education is a structured and formal entity that bears the task of transmitting knowledge, skills, values, and group norms to members of society (especially children and adolescents). This institution, which manifests itself mostly in the form of schools and universities, not only attends to the flourishing of each individual and the growth of their knowledge, but is also considered a tool for socialization and the preservation of cultural cohesion.

The organization of education is a governmental and executive body responsible for planning, supervising, and managing the formal process of teaching and training at the national level. This organization determines macro frameworks such as setting curricula, formulating evaluation criteria, providing resources and facilities, and policymaking for the training and deployment of human resources (teachers). In truth, the organization of education is a hierarchical and bureaucratic structure that seeks to transmit the educational ideals defined by the socio-political system — in the form of directives, circulars, and regulations — to schools and classrooms, and to supervise their implementation.

Esteemed master, I now have a question for you: Does the true standing and identity of the teacher derive from their administrative position and bureaucratic status within the organization of education as an "executive employee," or does it spring from their foundational and meaning-making role within the institution of education as a "human-cultural realm"? In other words, is the teacher's credibility and dignity the product of their appointed position within a hierarchical structure with defined rights and duties, or is it the outcome of a mission that society entrusts to them through an unwritten covenant — a mission that sees the teacher as the inheritor of a knowledge-bestowing tradition and the agent of the flourishing of human possibilities? The question of the source of the teacher's legitimacy is, in fact, a question of this fundamental conflict: belonging to an administrative structure that subjects them to the logic of the employee, or being bound to a cultural institution that defines their very being through ethical dialogue and a liberating responsibility.

ghapanvari:
A kind of sub-system within a vast organization can abandon everything to mere instrumental value — values that become carriers of erosion within the structure and the whole. The subject, that is, the teacher, becomes, in Foucault's words, "a subject of knowledge." A figure who can only be examined from within circulars and their stereotyped requirements. Knowledge is a transformation that refers both inward and outward. That is, the teacher/subject emerges from passivity and steps into the realm of well-being and illumination. The concern for economics and the destructive administrative constraints cause study, scholarly gatherings, and other paths to well-being and illumination to give way to a grinding erosion, to the mere performance of duty. The theory of surplus value, which Tolstoy created in the technique of the novel, is illuminating here (meaning: any object can, in speech, speak of the fine qualities of others). The unchanging view of the teacher can reduce them to an object emptied of concern for education, merely speaking in repetitions — mechanistic and devoid of an organic bond within the structure of this organization — capable of being transformed, and far from immune to any kind of transformation in the direction of reification. The ancient Greeks understood transformation and knowledge not in theory and listening, but in practice; thus pragmatism guided them to the very wellsprings of wisdom. Where theory dominates and practice is perpetually defeated, lethargy, bureaucracy, and reification take possession.

Chahardoli:
Your response points to the heart of a modern paradox: the teacher is caught between two forces. On the one hand, the bureaucratic structure of the education system, with its logic of circulars and quantified values, seeks to reduce the teacher to an executive and replaceable "object" that merely repeats formulas. This process is precisely the "reification" that withers the living and dialogical mission of education. On the other hand, the core of the teacher's identity lies precisely in the rebellion against this reductionism — in that very knowledge-bestowing "practice" that the ancient Greeks emphasized. The true legitimacy of the teacher springs not from their administrative position, but from this very capacity for "transformative practice" and from their bond with the community. Thus, the authentic teacher, even within a corrosive structure, is a subject who, by creating dialogic and liberating spaces, emerges from passivity and once again recovers their foundational role. The challenge today is the transition from the "teacher-object," submissive to the administrative system, to the "teacher-subject" who renders the structure meaningful from within.

Drawing on the thought of Berger and Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality — who regard institutions as objectified social realities that are at the same time the product of human interaction — the organization of education emerges as a necessary institution to reproduce and control the shared symbolic order of society through institutionalized processes (such as curriculum and teacher selection). This institution, by mediating between family and society, reduces the role of parents to that of a "customer of educational services" and, by assuming the exclusive responsibility of formal training, fuels a kind of mechanization of the educational relationship: parents, by handing over the grave task of upbringing to the "apparatus," consider themselves absolved of its complex ethical and epistemological responsibility, and the teacher, in this middle ground, appears not as a partner in a shared project, but as the executive agent of a distant and directive-driven institution. In contrast, an anarchist vision — inspired by experiences such as free schools or self-governing learning communities — emphasizes the revival of horizontal educational communities, where the boundaries between policymaker, teacher, parents, and student dissolve, and education once again becomes a collective project.

ghapanvari:
The link between instrumental reason and non-communicative action lies at the very point where both manifest within an organization that is non-agentive and passive. Dialogues are pushed to the margins, and monologues foster a conceited processing within the docile individual. Anesthetization and regression cause education to become sluggish. The background always binds the hands and feet of thought in a past far from transformation, nailing it to tradition precisely where the prospect of transformation is meant to lead society toward a transient understanding and convergence with modernity. Paths of difference and distinction open onto a conscious beyond. Education becomes stagnant where all questions are washed clean in a single ideology, screened, and designed to produce a moderate exit according to the dominant view. One can never, and must never, expect any vitality from such an output. The mutilation of expectations distances people from this culture, and populism and lumpenism spread their relentless roots, octopus-like, into all its affairs and aspects.

Chahardoli:
Greetings. I shall conclude our conversation by summing up as follows: The identity of the teacher is defined in the tension between two roles. On the one hand, the teacher is an "executive employee" within the bureaucratic and hierarchical structure of the organization of education, controlled by circulars, quantified values, and administrative logic, and prone to "reification." On the other hand, the teacher is a "meaning-making agent" at the heart of the institution of education, whose legitimacy springs from a cultural and ethical mission, and from a liberating dialogue with the community. The main challenge is the triumph of organizational logic over institutional logic, which drags education toward routinization, repetition, and passivity. The way out is the revival of the teacher's agency as a subject who can, through their transformative action, render educational spaces meaningful even within constraining structures.