Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) sends a message marking the new academic year in Iran, saluting students, teachers, lecturers, and professors and highlighting freedom as the first lesson of generations of struggle.
Below, you can read the full text of Mrs. Maryam Rajavi’s message.
Freedom: The First Lesson of Generations in Revolt and Revolution
Happy Beginning of the New Academic Year
With millions of students and young people returning to schools, high schools, and universities, the tremendous spirit of freedom and resistance rises anew, blossoming, stirring, and gaining momentum. It advances to fulfill its rightful role in shaping destiny and making its worthy contribution.
Salute to the students, teachers, lecturers, and professors who, in continuation of the 120-year history of the Iranian people’s struggle, unite knowledge with the cause of freedom.
From the Classroom to the Frontlines of Struggle
The first lesson is freedom.
It is the highest lesson, an eternal lesson, one that has always guided those great individuals who have led humanity out of the darkness of tyranny, backwardness, ignorance, and oppression toward an era of liberty, knowledge, and progress.
The university and high school students who played a decisive role in the 1979 revolution against monarchical dictatorship;
Those who, throughout the 1980s, sacrificed their lives by the thousands on the battlefields or in Khomeini’s torture chambers;
The heroes who created the epic of September 27, 1981; and the successive generations of young people who have stood at the forefront of uprisings from the 1990s through January 2026, have all passed on, through their suffering and sacrifice, the lesson of freedom to the generations that followed them.
The past year was marked by the courageous advance of students and youth into the fiercest arenas of struggle for the overthrow of the regime. From those who gave their lives during confrontations with the Revolutionary Guards in the streets, to the defiant prisoners who since the beginning of the (Persian) year, faced the gallows for standing their grounds.
Resistance Units and pioneering young activists, including the fallen members of the PMOI/MEK, Vahid Bani Amerian, Babak Alipour, Pouya Ghobadi, and Mehdi Khanki, have become role models for Iran’s younger generation in choosing a noble path toward the liberation and freedom of Iran.
This rising generation, Generation Z, challenges every form of dictatorship, whether under a monarch or a cleric.
It is a generation that declares: We will not surrender. A generation whose destination is freedom, democracy, and equality. A generation that has chosen rebellion in Iran’s cities, resistance behind prison walls, and steadfastness even in the shadow of the gallows.
A large proportion of those who participated in the January uprising came from this very generation. Regime officials acknowledged that in some provinces, up to 45 percent of protesters were young people under the age of 20. Many of those killed or arrested also belonged to this generation.
Yes, “the first word and the first lesson remain the same lesson that students wrote with their own blood in an endless line: F stands for Freedom.”
They have emerged from schools and universities that are increasingly constrained by repression, poverty, and inequality.
Poverty, Inequality, and Millions of Children Deprived of Education
While nine million people in the country remain illiterate and millions more possess only limited literacy, countless young people continue to be denied education because of poverty and economic hardship.
According to official reports, fifteen percent of the country’s children are classified as child laborers. Based on this figure, the number of child workers exceeds three million. Millions of children endure the degrading and heartbreaking reality of scavenging through waste for survival. Many are exploited for drug transportation, cross-border labor, or domestic work. Meanwhile, the lives of children and young people living in makeshift shelters, without housing, or in impoverished suburban communities continue to deteriorate year after year.
In universities, students’ lives and education are also affected by poverty, rising living costs, and suffocating restrictions. Upon graduation, many face little more than deprivation and humiliation. Of the country’s 14.5 million university graduates, at least 6.5 million are considered economically inactive. This is only part of a long list of crises rooted in a century of dictatorship, dependency, and corruption under both the Shah and the clerical establishment.
The ruling clerical dictatorship, whose foundations rest on ignorance and superstition, uses science and technology as instruments of surveillance, repression, and warmongering. Yet the true advancement of knowledge, and its contribution to Iran’s economic and social flourishing, can only be realized under conditions of freedom, democracy, and equality.
Massoud Rajavi has stated, “The Army of Freedom is the only path to freedom.”
Salute to the young and energetic generation in the Army of Freedom, preparing for uprising, revolution, and the dismantling of oppression and dictatorship.
— Maryam Rajavi (@Maryam_Rajavi) September 22, 2026
