Every year, millions of Pakistani children spend twelve years in classrooms learning how to do almost everything except live. Declared successful, they smile for cameras, host lavish feasts, and pose in graduation gowns. Then they go home and cannot change a light bulb, cook a meal, or clean a floor—because to them, a broom feels like a betrayal of their degrees.
The Curriculum's Absurd Demands
To understand the scale of this absurdity, we must stop polishing the national delusion about what the curriculum actually demands. It demands that a child spend an entire week before every new school year wrapping textbooks in brown paper and plastic sheets, cutting and pasting magazine photographs onto chart paper, and calling it a "project."
It demands that students draw the water cycle. Then draw it again in class four. Then again in class five. The same clouds, the same arrows, the same labeled "evaporation" and "condensation" that they traced the year before—because nobody ever asked whether they understood it, only whether they could reproduce it neatly enough.
Memorization Over Understanding
Beyond that, it demands that children memorize the exact height of every mountain in Pakistan, down to the meter, as if one day they will be standing at the foot of Nanga Parbat and a stranger will ask them to confirm the number. It also demands they memorize the longitude and latitude of Islamabad, as if the capital city will drift into the Arabian Sea should they forget it by Thursday.
Then there is the Urdu application: it demands that students write using phrases so ancient and theatrical that they border on a formality which has forgotten how to be useful. "Janab Aali, ba-kamaal adab arz hai ke"—Your Esteemed Excellency, with utmost reverence, I beg to submit. Remember: these are children applying for sick leave, not ambassadors petitioning a royal court.
The Real Comedy Begins
It demands that a child memorize the exact dates of battles fought centuries ago, word for word, comma for comma, as if the ghost of Muhammad bin Qasim will rise from his grave and personally fail the student who confuses 712 AD with 713 AD. The dates are memorized, the wars are won, the exam is passed—and not a single child heads home with any analytical grasp of what objectively happened.
Quite a few demands, aren't there? Perhaps the most absurd is that it spends enormous classroom time drilling students on how to draw margins with pencils, underline headings with rulers, and present notebooks to please the teacher's eye. The notebook is submitted, the presentation is graded, the thinking is never checked because the thinking was never the point. Is this education, or institutionalized wasting of time?
The Loss of Common Sense
The tragedy is not just that these practices waste time. No, the real tragedy is what they are quietly teaching: the loss of common sense. They are teaching children that the final insights live in the curriculum and nowhere else, and that physical work is something you outsource, tolerate, or inherit from a lower station in life.
This ideology does not stay in the classroom. It walks out with the child, grows with them, and becomes the breeding ground for some of the most toxic behavior in Pakistani society.
