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English language teaching has always been treated as a socio-cultural issue in post-revolutionary Iran. Fueled by anti-imperialist sentiment, the political authorities diagnosed Western influence as the major ailment of the society. Having to accommodate for the undeniable virtue of learning English for international communication, educationalists prescribed limited, censured doses of culture-free, localized English input to bring up a new generation immune to the Western values. The analysis of the educational goals in Iranian macro educational documents and their realization in teaching materials reveals an organized effort to resist and undo the influence of neoliberal education and provide an alternative rooted in national-religious heritage of the country. To examine whether this localized version can survive amid neoliberal forces in education and compete with its imported goods, the present article attempts to provide a bird’s eye view about the interplay of policy, culture, and political ideology in the curriculum through content analysis of the Iranian macro official documents and their manifestations in local ELT textbooks, supplemented by the researcher’s perspectives as an insider with prolonged engagement in this educational system. Hopefully, careful scrutiny of Iranian ELT program in its wider socio-cultural context contains lessons about avertable errors when proposing alternatives to neoliberal education.

ELT as necessary evil: resisting Western cultural dominance in foreign language policy in the context of Iran