From Reception to Rebelling: A Deconstructive Look at Educational Borrowing Policies in Modern Iran

The main purpose of this study is to review and critique two competing educational borrowing policies in contemporary Iran, namely the wholesale reception of the West and the rebelling against it based on the issue of identity. In the first policy, the ideas of Akhundzadeh and Malkum Khan and in the second policy, the ideas of Shariati, Al-Ahmad and the official documents of educational reform after the Islamic Revolution are emphasized. Derrida's deconstruction approach has also been used to critique these policies and to reveal the contradictions of each of them, to go beyond the aporiatic situation resulting from this confrontation. Deconstruction shows that both politics are caught up in the metaphysics of presence and auto-immunity, ignoring the differance, supplementarity, and contamination between the "self" and the "other." It is also suggested at the end of the article, that the acceptance of the aporiatic situation as a transcendent condition of reform, identity non-closure, and supplementarity in Derrida's concept of negotiation be incorporated into the structure of any forthcoming borrowing policy.