Count the words that ask a pupil to think — evaluate, justify, assess, argue, debate — across Pakistan’s five textbook boards, and Balochistan wins comfortably. Its History 8 sets thirty-two such prompts. Its Pakistan Studies 9 sets thirty. No other board in this study comes close on volume.
You could write an encouraging paragraph about that. Here is one of the prompts.
Justify that the Treaty of Sevres is based on fair justice.
The Treaty of Sèvres carved up the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. It is not remembered as an instrument of fair justice by anyone, and it is not remembered that way by this book either: elsewhere in the same volume the treaty is part of the grievance that drove the Khilafat Movement. The pupil is asked to justify a proposition the book’s own narrative contradicts.
It is not an isolated item. The same volume asks pupils to:
- “Justify that Aligarh can be considered the Oxford University for [Muslims]” (p. 5)
- “Justify that Jinnah can be truly claimed as the True Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim [Unity]” (p. 44)
- “Justify that Allama Iqbal has rightly earned the title of the ‘Poet of the East’” (p. 58)
Each begins with an analytical verb. Each ends with the conclusion already supplied. The pupil’s task is not to decide whether Aligarh was the Muslim Oxford; it is to assemble reasons why it was.
And across all thirty-two prompts in that book, the number that ask a pupil what they actually think — in your opinion, do you think — is zero.
The control case, in the same board’s physics book
The obvious objection is that justify that is simply how school questions are phrased, and reading ideology into a verb is overreach. The objection is good, and this corpus happens to contain its own answer.
Balochistan’s Physics 9 uses the identical construction twenty-one times:
Justify that distance, speed, time, mass, energy and temperature are scalar quantities.
Nobody should object to that. Those quantities are scalars; the proposition is demonstrable; the pupil justifies it by understanding it. The form is doing honest work.
Its Biology 9 does the same: “Justify with examples that science is a collaborative field that requires interdisciplinary [work]” — arguable, but defensible, and the pupil could genuinely marshal evidence.
So the template is not the problem. The template is only loaded when the proposition is contestable and the contest has been settled in advance. “These are scalar quantities” and “the Treaty of Sèvres is based on fair justice” are not the same kind of sentence, and a pupil asked to justify both is being taught something about which questions are open.
Where the openness goes
The same board sets genuinely open work. Its Geography 8 tells teachers to “organize a debate among the students on the reasons why Pakistan’s exports are less than other South Asian countries”. Its Geography 7 asks pupils to “evaluate the reasons for low” agricultural yield — a real multi-cause analysis with no supplied answer. Its English 7 carries five open-opinion prompts, the highest density in the board.
Sort the prompts by subject and the pattern is not subtle:
| Subject | What the pupil is asked to do |
|---|---|
| Geography, science, English | Weigh causes, debate, form a view |
| History, Pakistan Studies | Justify a conclusion already given |
This is not a board that fails to teach critical thinking. It is a board that teaches critical thinking and then withdraws it from precisely the subjects where the national story lives.
The same shape, at the other end of school
We found the identical division at matriculation, and it corrected something this project had previously got wrong. We had reported that open inquiry “collapses at matriculation everywhere”. It does not. Punjab’s English 10 sets twenty-two open-opinion prompts — the most of any book in this corpus — including “do you think that climate change is our moral responsibility”. Sindh’s sets five, among them “Do you think that social media is a good thing or a bad thing”.
Every one of those prompts is about climate, technology, literature or a pupil’s own life. The class-10 books that carry the national narrative set almost none at all.
The Federal Board, added to this study after the piece was first written, makes the pattern harder to dismiss. Its English readers set 14 open-opinion prompts at class 9 and 16 at class 10 — more than any provincial reader at any class. Its Pakistan Studies 9 sets zero, in a volume whose subject is the ideological basis of the state. Same board, same year, opposite demand. The one partial exception anywhere in the corpus is the federal Pakistan Studies 10, which does set four open prompts alongside 24 evaluation ones — the only class-10 book carrying the national narrative that asks the pupil anything at all.
So the corrected statement is sharper than the one it replaces: openness at matriculation is not absent. It is allocated. Pupils are taught to hold and defend an opinion, and they are taught it on subjects where no institutional interest is at stake.
What would refute this
One open-opinion prompt about a contested national question, in any class-10 Pakistan Studies volume from any of the five boards, would do real damage to the argument above. We looked for one and did not find it. If you find it, we will publish the correction, because the claim is only worth making if it can be broken.
The books are catalogued here, with editions and page numbers, so that you can go and look.