The most persistent finding in this study is also its most deflating: curriculum vintage, not province, is usually the sharper divide. Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa run literally the same Islamiyat books at classes 6 and 7. Four science subjects are shared across boards. Much of what looks like a provincial disagreement turns out to be two boards printing different editions of the same federal ancestor, years apart.
That finding cuts against the whole premise of comparing provinces. If the books differ mainly because they were written in different decades, then “what does Sindh teach” is close to a malformed question.
So it matters a great deal when two boards, working from the same curriculum document, produce materially different books.
The matched pair
When Balochistan entered this study its books were catalogued as running the federal NCC Inclusive Scheme of Studies 2024 — the scheme the board publishes on its own website. Reading the front matter of all twenty-eight volumes showed that phrase appears in none of them. Balochistan is running two curriculum generations side by side: classes 6 to 9 on National Curriculum 2022-23, printed as pilot editions for a single academic year, and class 10 on National Curriculum 2006.
That correction cost the study a claim — Balochistan’s books are not, as we had said, the newest in the corpus. It bought something better. Balochistan is now the only board that supplies a vintage-matched partner for both of the other generations. Its classes 6–9 match Punjab’s SNC 2022 books. Its class 10 matches Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s and Sindh’s National Curriculum 2006 books.
Which gives us a genuine like-for-like: two provinces, the same curriculum document, the same subject, the same year of school.
What Balochistan’s book does
Balochistan’s Pakistan Studies 10 teaches the 1973 Constitution as an instrument that is currently in force and that confers rights on the reader:
the constitution “guarantees the fundamental rights to all Pakistani citizens irrespective of their religion, ethnicity etc. The constitution also guarantees the rights of the minorities” — page 11
It teaches local government with “reserved seats for women and minorities” (p. 20). It devotes a chapter to Restoration of Democracy (1988-99). Its learning outcomes require pupils to “comprehend the causes of Military take-over of 12 October 1999” — naming a coup as a subject of study.
And it narrates Benazir Bhutto’s two terms as prime minister at length and in political detail. Not as a symbol, not as somebody’s daughter, but as a head of government making decisions: Ghulam Ishaq Khan “invited Benazir Bhutto, being the leader of the majority party to form the government, which she accepted” (p. 14). Her foreign policy. Her nuclear-installations agreement with India. The dismissal of her government. “Contrary to her first tenure, the relations with India remained tense.”
Feminine pronouns in that volume actually outnumber masculine ones — and unusually for this corpus, they refer to a woman rather than to the nation.
What Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s book does
The same curriculum. The same class. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Pakistan Studies 10 also covers the 1973 Constitution, and covers it competently — “a new constitution based on federal and parliamentary principles”. But it treats it as an event in a sequence rather than as a set of rights the reader holds. It names no woman in government. And, as we have written elsewhere, it asks the pupil to evaluate none of it: the volume contains zero evaluation verbs and zero open-opinion prompts.
Two books. One curriculum document. One of them puts a woman prime minister and a minority-rights guarantee in front of a sixteen-year-old, and the other does not.
A postscript the Federal board added
This piece was written before the Federal Board (FBISE) entered the study — the board that teaches Islamabad and the federal-system schools, and the one the provinces are nominally working from. Scoring it sharpened the argument above rather than softening it.
Federal turns out to be the most secular and the least conservative of the five boards on both composite indices at once. Its Pakistan Studies 10 carries the densest civic content in the entire corpus — the 1973 Constitution taught clause by clause, including an independent judiciary and provincial autonomy, as law currently in force.
Which means the divergence this piece describes is not provinces drifting apart from each other around some neutral middle. It is provinces drifting from a common centre, consistently in one direction — every provincial version of the same curriculum is more religiously saturated, thinner on civics and more gender-conservative than the federal text it derives from. Punjab, which prints the newest books in the country, sits furthest from that centre.
The caveat travels with it: Federal is scored on ten English-medium books against Punjab’s twenty-two, and only at classes 9 and 10. The direction is consistent on every axis; the margins are not large.
Why this matters more than a ranking
It would be easy to turn this into a league table — Balochistan good, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa bad. That would be a misuse of it, and this site refuses that move deliberately: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s book is franker about martial law than most, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is the only board in the entire corpus that names two women scientists.
The point is structural. A federal curriculum document does not determine a textbook. Within the same instructions, a provincial board chose to teach the constitution as a living guarantee and to narrate a woman exercising power, and another board chose otherwise. The space for that choice exists, it is being used, and it is being used differently.
That cuts directly against this study’s own dominant finding. Both results are real: vintage explains more of the variation than province does, and province still explains something irreducible. They bound each other, and anyone quoting one of them without the other is quoting half a study.
The caveats, which are not small
This is a comparison of two books, not two provinces. Balochistan’s volumes are pilot editions printed for a single academic year and explicitly soliciting revision feedback — they may not survive in this form. Twelve of its twenty-eight books are Urdu-medium and cannot be quoted at all, so any account of what a Balochistan pupil meets across their whole schooling is partial. And eight Balochistan books we looked for could not be found, which breaks the class 6-to-10 sequence for English and Islamiyat entirely.
All of that is listed, in detail, on the page describing what this study is missing. The comparison above is worth making anyway, because it is the only properly matched one available — and because it is the clearest evidence in the corpus that these books are chosen rather than inherited.