Overview / About
About this project
An encyclopedia of what Pakistan's four provincial textbook boards actually teach — assembled book by book, page by page, and published so that anyone can check it.
What it is
Pakistan's school curriculum is argued about constantly and read carefully by almost nobody. Claims about what the textbooks say circulate for years without anyone opening the books. This project opens them: 167 volumes in use today across the Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan boards, classes 6 to 10, plus 43 withdrawn editions reaching back to 1949.
Every book is catalogued with its edition, its approval reference and its provenance. Every claim carries a page citation. 46 discrete findings are published individually so they can be quoted, checked, and disputed one at a time rather than as a bloc.
The scoring rubric was written down before any book was read, so that the measurements could not drift toward a preferred conclusion. Where the evidence contradicts the project's own argument, it is published in the same section, at the same prominence.
About the author
Aasim Saeed is a Pakistani writer, born in a village in the Faisalabad District of Punjab and raised in Lahore. Trained as a computer scientist at the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (FAST) in Lahore, he has written for online and print publications since 2000 — first as a columnist and blogger, later across social media.
He has lived in England since 2017 and works in IT service management. He reads Urdu, English and Punjabi, with a working knowledge of Arabic and Persian.
His first book, From Secular Order to Shadow Wars, 1970–2009: Essays on Intelligence, Proxies and the Secret History of the Middle East and South Asia, is forthcoming.
This study began with a question about his own schooling — whether the connections a pupil draws between subjects are ones the books intend. That question shaped the method, but it is not the evidence. Nothing in this project rests on recollection; every finding rests on a page that anyone can open.
How to use it
Quote it. Every finding page carries a citation block. The catalogue links to the source we obtained each book from, credited, so a reader can retrieve the original rather than take our word for its contents.
The textbooks themselves are not republished here — they carry explicit reservations of rights, and free distribution to pupils is not a licence to redistribute. Passages are excerpted for criticism and analysis, and page images are reproduced as evidence for specific claims. That is ordinary scholarly practice and it is how the argument is made.
How to challenge it
Corrections are welcome and are the point. If a citation is wrong, an edition is misidentified, a translation is unfair or a finding does not survive its own evidence, that should be fixed — visibly, with the correction left on the record rather than quietly rewritten.
A study that never shows its errors is asking to be trusted rather than checked. So every correction this project has made is listed below, with what was wrong, what it changed, and whether any published claim moved.
Corrections log
This log records corrections to claims that have been published — what was wrong, what changed, and whether any finding moved. Entries stay permanently, including the embarrassing ones. Nothing is quietly patched.
This site went live on . Everything before that was drafting, and drafting is not correction — no reader could have relied on a figure that had never left the project. Listing pre-publication edits here would imply claims went out into the world and were fixed, which would be untrue and would make this page misleading in exactly the way it exists to prevent.
The mistakes made while building this were real and several were instructive. They are recorded where they are useful rather than where they are penitent: the ones that reveal how the method can fail are written up in the method, so that anyone reproducing this work meets the same traps with a warning attached.
From the launch date forward, every correction to a published claim appears here, dated, whether or not it suits the argument — and whether it was found by this project or pointed out by a reader. The right of reply is open to any board, author or individual described on this site.
Report an error, or get in touch
If something here is wrong, the useful report names the page, the specific claim, and what you believe the correct position is — ideally with the board, book, edition and printed page. Write to [email protected]. Reports that identify a factual error will be acted on and logged above whether or not the correction is convenient for the argument. This applies fully to the boards themselves: if a board disputes a characterisation of its own book, that dispute is worth publishing alongside the finding, and if a board asks for material to be removed it will be removed and the removal recorded here.
What it does not claim
It does not claim to know what any child believes. The corpus shows what is taught, what is repeated, in what order it arrives, and what pupils are required to reproduce in an examination. It does not observe classroom practice, actual examination papers, or the many other forces — family, media, politics, economics — that shape a person. Where an argument depends on an unobserved step, the step is named.