Compare boards, subject by subject

Across the scored corpus of seventy-seven books the subjects divide cleanly into those that carry ideological load and those that do not, and the split is remarkably consistent in shape across all three boards even though its placement is not. The load-bearing subjects are History, Pakistan Studies, Islamiyat, Sindh's Social Studies, and — this is the finding most easily missed — both language readers. The technocratic subjects are Geography and all four sciences. Chemistry is the one subject in which no board puts scripture in the book; Biology is the one subject in which all three do, in a Chapter 1 Quranic section quoting the same verses, and that section survived Punjab's complete rewrite to the 2023 curriculum. Geography carries A2 5 and A5 1 in all six volumes, and its ideology is confined to two Punjab intrusions: the map label "INDIAN ILLEGALLY OCCUPIED JAMMU & KASHMIR", and a class-6 passage of colonial racial ethnography ("People are uncivilized") recycled as an examinable MCQ in a 2022 SNC-branded volume — the corpus's only band-4 othering finding with no counterpart in either other board, and the one that attracts no scrutiny at all.

But the boards do not put their load in the same subjects. Punjab distributes it: martial patriotism reaches A5 4 or higher in four subjects — English, Urdu, History and Pakistan Studies — against KP's one and Sindh's none, and at class 6 Punjab is redundant across media, teaching the same eleven-name Nishan-e-Haider roll in both the English and the Urdu reader. KP channels its: its four English readers across roughly seventy-five selections contain no martyr, no Nishan-e-Haider and no war narrative, while everything martial sits in the Urdu reader at classes 6 to 8 and stops. A KP pupil in the English-medium stream of the same board never meets it. Sindh substitutes: where other boards put a soldier, Sindh puts Edhi, Shah Abdul Latif, or Hakim Muhammad Said, a civilian physician.

How a theme travels inside one board is the most instructive unit of analysis in the study. Punjab's English reader delivers the Two-Nation Theory, the 1940 Lahore address and the Fourteen Points at class 7 — a full year before its History syllabus reaches the Pakistan Movement — asking pupils "How does the author of the text justify that the Hindus and the Muslims belonged to two different nations?" Counting readers, the Movement gets three passes in both Punjab and KP, and across Punjab's three the central claim degrades epistemically: from argued at class 7, to stipulated at class 8 ("debate to conclude"), to eternal at class 9, where it is dated to the arrival of Muslims in the subcontinent. The same board's class-8 History attributes the theory to Sir Syed; neither version is flagged as contested. The Farewell Sermon travels furthest of any text — seven books across three subjects. Sindh and KP teach it twice each, as ethics; Punjab teaches it three times and uniquely re-purposes it as a constitutional proof-text inside the Ideological Basis of Pakistan chapter, immediately before "Almighty Allah is the source of law". And a theme can be relocated rather than removed: Punjab's six science books and eight readers contain no Muslim-scientist material at all, but the strand survives in History 7's Golden Age of Islam section. It moved subject, not curriculum — a subject-boundary decision, not a secularising one.

Stack all twelve subjects and the class 6 to 10 progression contradicts the intuition that these curricula radicalise with age. Militarism falls or holds and never rises: Punjab peaks at class 6, delivering military martyrdom to eleven-year-olds in two languages simultaneously; KP plateaus at 6 to 8 then drops to 2; Sindh is flat-low throughout. Othering escalates monotonically in exactly one board — Punjab, 2 to 3 to 4 to 5 from class 6 to class 9, peaking at an examination item whose keyed answer is "Hindus are not our friends" — while Sindh has no ramp at all but a four-band cliff at class 8, and two boards de-escalate at class 10 in the same slot, the Population, Society and Culture chapter with its minorities and interfaith-harmony sections. Civics front-loads and collapses in Sindh (peak at age eleven, gone by class 8) and never accumulates in Punjab. Inquiry collapses at matriculation in every board regardless of vintage: classes 6 to 8 average around 3.0, classes 9 and 10 around 4.5. Religious saturation traces three different curves — a shallow U in Punjab, the corpus's steepest climb in Sindh, a high plateau in KP whose newer books score lower than its older ones.

The order of teaching matters as much as the totals. A Punjab pupil is taught to admire a martyr at eleven, told at thirteen that the 1965 army was "filled with the spirit of Jihad", and only at fourteen given the doctrinal apparatus that restricts jihad to the state and distinguishes it from terrorism — and that lesson's own exercise set, on one printed page, both tests Paigham-e-Pakistan and directs pupils to record the Nishan-e-Haider martyrs in their diaries. In every board the first out-group a child meets in an evaluative frame is religious, not national: the Jews of Khyber, in class-6 Islamiyat.

Certain things no province escapes. No woman appears anywhere as an agent of knowledge: zero named women scientists across roughly 500,000 words of science, no woman profiled as a scholar in any Islamiyat volume, and no woman credited as author of any selection in twelve Urdu readers. The "Hindu teachers" explanation for 1971 survives in all three boards across 2004, 2023 and 2024-25 editions. Partition violence is absent everywhere, as is any economic critique of colonialism. No board teaches its own province's history. Pakistani religious minorities are the one out-group all three treat in the pluralist half of the scale, and the West is not an out-group anywhere.

For anyone trying to change these books, four things follow. First, the vintage gap is structural, not an acquisition artefact: Sindh has not adopted the SNC at all and KP's adoption covers six subjects at one grade, so a national curriculum revision does not reach two provinces — and the gap is widening rather than closing, because Punjab has now reissued its class 10 under a 2026 PECTAA syllabus, a further generation beyond SNC 2022. Second, recency is not reform: Punjab already ran the newest books in the corpus and produced the most closed national narrative in it, and new vintage buys the vocabulary of inquiry without its substance. Third, pluralism as currently practised is compartmentalised — Punjab's Pakistan Studies 9 and 10 are consecutive volumes of one course scoring 5 and 1 on othering, because the inclusive material sits in the citizenship slot and never touches the historical narrative. Adding inclusive content does not displace exclusive content. Fourth, the dominant gender mechanism is absence, not prescription: thirty-one books score at the conservative pole and every one is absence-driven, which is a commissioning problem rather than a censorship one, and cheap to fix — KP's Physics 9 simply writes its worked problems with female actors, at no cost.

Two limits belong on the front of any use of this. The evidence itself is a policy fact: twenty-four of the scored books are Urdu-medium and theme-grade, KP's scores are the least secure of the three boards, and a Nastaliq-tuned OCR pass on KP's class-8 History alone would move more of this analysis than any other single acquisition. And the scored corpus is thin at the matriculation year outside Pakistan Studies: eleven class-10 volumes from Punjab and KP — English, Urdu, Islamiyat, Biology, Chemistry and Physics — have only just entered the corpus and carry no lens scores, so every progression claim above about what a pupil has been taught by the time they sit matriculation rests on classes 6 to 9 plus the two Pakistan Studies sequences.