The Council of Cooperation between the Ministry of Education and the seminaries has reported an agreement according to which a group of public schools in Tehran province will be managed under the supervision of the seminary of Tehran. In accordance with this new program, a member of the clergy will be permanently stationed in each school, and all the cultural and education programs will be supervised by clerics. The goal of this program is "to be active within the framework of the religion and the principles of the Islamic Republic [of Iran] and to spread the ideology of the Guardianship of the Jurist." This program will gradually expand to include more public schools each year.

There is a long history of clerical involvement in Iran's educational system. Prior to the establishment of modern schools, all levels of education in Iran were supervised by the traditional clerical system, from the elementary level to higher education at seminaries. A variety of traditional sciences, including natural sciences and mathematics, were taught in the seminaries in a manner compatible with Islamic theology.

Dar ul-Funun is among the first examples of nonreligious Western-style schools in Iran. It was founded by Amir Kabir, the prime minister who served under Naser al-Din Shah in 1851. For the first time and with the help of Western teachers, modern sciences were taught in Dar ul-Funun in a manner completely separate from the clerical establishment. Gradually, these types of schools became common in Iran and, eventually, this system came to dominate all levels of education, from elementary to university. As a result, the clerics were completely removed from the official educational system of the country and were left to supervise only their own seminary schools and those students who were interested in pursuing a traditional Islamic education.

This trend, which resulted in the isolation of clerics and their lack of involvement in society, was one of main reasons for the tension between the clerical establishment and the Iranian government prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. With the hope of influencing the new educational system of the country at the time, a group of clerics became active in schools and universities in Iran. People such as Morteza Motahhari, Mohammad Mofatteh, Mohammad Beheshti and Mohammad Javad Bahonar became official employees of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Higher Education. The latter two were among the authors of the religious textbooks written for schools in Iran prior to the revolution. Some of the Iranian clerics, with the aid of religious benefactors, founded private schools, which were managed according to religious doctrines.