Continued ... (Part Two)
A Reflection on Mobina’s Request
Aydin Areta

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The problem is not Mobina’s request. The problem is not even the people who, on the basis of the existing system, are disturbed by her request. The problem is our educational system and its methods of teaching and assessment, under which both Mobina and the public are victims of outdated, binary and closed procedures.

From the age of eighteen until today, for almost thirty years, I have been continuously a student and, for a large part of those years, simultaneously a student and a teacher. When I applied for admission to a PhD in philosophy, the head of the philosophy department interviewed me and asked with surprise why a doctor wanted to study philosophy. Through his questions and review of my proposal he accepted my capacity to study philosophy. My being a physician was not regarded as a disadvantage; rather, it confirmed the depth of my love for philosophy. When I applied for psychiatry training, the fact that I had moved from medicine into philosophy and now wanted to return to medicine was not treated as a negative. Instead, my varied interests became the subject of a warm and pleasant discussion between me and the selection panel. Nearly two years ago I applied, at the same university where I was a medical-school academic, for admission to a doctorate in sociology specialising in culture and discourse. I am still a student in that programme and enjoy it immensely. When I spoke with my supervisor about my journey of learning and about all my successes, failures and aspirations, what mattered to them was the love and aspirations I brought to work I had decided to begin on the threshold of forty-five.

What I want to say to ourselves—to us as a people—is that both we and Mobina are victims of a flawed educational system that measures the totality of our being and ability either through one examination taken at eighteen or through the money in our family’s pocket. What I want to say to Mobina is that your sporting achievements are certainly valuable for admission to medicine. Discipline, time management, determination and persistence: all of these, together with your love for medicine, matter. Dear Mobina, you are not the only athlete in history to have pursued both elite sport and medicine. Roger Bannister became a distinguished neurologist and was also a world-class athlete. More broadly, throughout the history of medicine many people have come to medicine from other fields. Dr Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, was first an artist and painter and later became interested in medicine. Alexis Carrel, the father of vascular surgery, first studied philosophy and then became interested in medicine. Paul Ehrlich, a Nobel laureate in medicine, was first a botanist.

I do not imagine our educational system would have allowed any of them this kind of growth and change. Is there anyone within our educational system who has ever seriously considered how exhausted, rigid and inflexible our educational structure has become, and how capable it is of killing talent?
I hope there is. I hope there is the motivation and thought needed to save future generations of Iranians from this futile process.

Dear Mobina, in an ideal world your sporting ability would certainly be a major advantage in gaining entry to medicine, but even in that ideal world a minimum academic threshold would still be required. The point is that amid all this uproar, what was discussed least was what else, apart from being an Olympic champion, Mobina brings to medical admission. If I were responsible for admissions, I would give substantial credit to your championship and to the qualities in your character that made it possible. Then I would ask why you want to become a doctor, and if I saw in that answer a love of medicine and a love of people, I would give you the full personal score. But I would ask another question as well: what have you done across your educational history? Not in every subject, but in those you have actually loved, because those are the real measure of the relationship between loving something and learning it within you. If you had performed well even only in those subjects, I would consider you deserving of admission to medicine.

In my view, what your request should create in our society is not a campaign to shame you for having made it, but a campaign to shame those who sit at the top of this defective system: a system in which neither you know how you are supposed to reach your dream nor do the people who have laboured for years and remained behind the closed doors of this examination of memory and recall.

Do not regret pursuing your dream. Do not be ashamed of it and do not become discouraged. We, the people, and you stand in a shared trench in the struggle to change Iran’s tomorrow. All of this is material for our society to think about. We will pass through these difficulties together.