Open Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Pakistan Studies for class 10 at the chapter on the 1970 election and you find something you might not expect. The book does not soften what happened. It records that “in East Pakistan the Awami League carried the day while Pakistan People’s Party won in West Pakistan”, that “differences emerged between the two parties”, and that forming a government became impossible. It goes on through the imposition of martial law, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s nationalisations, Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamisation, the Afghan war and the refugee crisis. It describes the 1973 Constitution as “a new constitution based on federal and parliamentary principles” and notes that it gave the country a bicameral legislature for the first time.
A pupil who reads that chapter carefully learns more about how Pakistan’s democratic order was made and unmade than a pupil in most of the other books this project has read.
Now look at what the book asks that pupil to do.
When was the nationalization of industries announced? A. 2nd January 1972 B. 12th January 1972 C. 16th January 1972 D. 20th January 1972
That is the register of the assessment throughout. We searched the entire volume for the words that ask a pupil to weigh something — evaluate, justify, assess, in your opinion, do you think.
The volume contains none of them. Not one, in either the English or the Urdu edition.
Its stated learning outcomes are explain, discuss, identify, comprehend, analyse. Those sound analytical, and in a different book they might be. Here they attach to a syllabus of events and dates, and the questions that follow ask which of four dates is correct.
Why this is the most interesting book in the corpus
Most criticism of Pakistani textbooks is about what they say. That criticism is often right, and this project has made plenty of it. But it has a blind spot, and this book sits precisely inside it.
If you judged Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Pakistan Studies 10 on content alone, you would call it relatively open. It names military intervention in civilian government as a thing that happened. It does not pretend the 1971 election result away. Content analysis — the standard tool in this field for thirty years — would score it well.
If you judge it on what it requires, it is closed. The pupil is never once positioned as someone whose judgement matters. They are positioned as someone who must know when something occurred.
Two instruments, the same book, opposite verdicts. That is not a flaw in the measurement. It is the finding.
The difference between offering and compelling
There is a reason to weight the second reading more heavily than the first.
A proposition a textbook merely states is offered. A pupil can skim it, disagree with it silently, or forget it by Thursday. A proposition a pupil must reproduce in an examination is different in kind: it is compelled. You cannot pass by disagreeing. Whatever else is true about how much of school anyone retains, the things you were made to write down under exam conditions are the things the system actually insisted on.
So the question this project has come to think matters most is not what does the book say but what must the pupil produce. And on that measure a book can be generous with information and still teach that political history is a set of facts rather than a set of arguments — that Zia’s Islamisation is something you know the dates of, not something you have a view about.
What we cannot tell you
We have not sat in a Peshawar classroom. A teacher who ignores the printed questions and asks the class what they think of martial law is doing something this method cannot see, and there is no reason to assume such teachers are rare. We have not seen the actual board examination papers, only the specimen questions the books print. And we cannot say what any pupil concluded, then or now — nobody has surveyed them, and this study does not pretend to.
What we can say is narrow and, we think, worth saying: in this book, the state’s own account of its most contested decades is available to the pupil and is never put to them as a question.
The prediction, and how to prove us wrong
If assessment demand shapes attitudes more than content does, then Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s school leavers should show an unusual pattern: high recall of critical political facts — the ban on political activity, the overthrow of an elected government — alongside attitudes toward civilian supremacy no different from provinces whose books say much less. Availability high, disposition unchanged.
That is a testable claim and it may well be wrong. A survey of school leavers across the four provinces would settle it, and if Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s leavers turn out to be markedly more sceptical of military rule than Punjab’s, the argument in this piece is in serious trouble.
Until someone runs it, what remains is the book itself, which anyone can open. It is catalogued here, with its edition, its approval reference and the page numbers for everything quoted above.