Overview / Findings
46 discrete findings, each traceable to a book, an edition and a page. Every one states its confidence, and the ones that cut against the study's own argument are here too.
Balochistan is the only one of the four boards running a working official portal that serves complete textbook PDFs. The confusion is a domain: btbb.gov.pk does not resolve, but btbb.com.pk hosts a 75-title catalogue. Punjab and KP serve no textbook PDFs from any official domain at all.
Balochistan publishes the federal National Curriculum Council "Inclusive Scheme of Studies, Grade Pre I–XII, 2024" as its own governing document — one generation past the Single National Curriculum. The board's hosted copy of that scheme contains zero occurrences of "2006", "SNC" or "NCP".
Punjab's class-9 English reader asks pupils to draw parallels between pre-Islamic Arabia and other "periods of decline and renewal". It names no target. The pupil supplies it — and is marked on having supplied it.
Punjab's class-9 Islamiyat teaches a deliberately narrow conception of jihad — defensive, a state monopoly, framed by the 2018 Paigham-e-Pakistan counter-terrorism declaration and distinguished from fasad fil-ard. The activities block on that same printed page directs pupils to write the names and deeds of Nishan-e-Haider recipients in their diaries.
Writing in 1993 about the March 1989 Punjab Textbook Board reprints, the historian K.K. Aziz described a pupil being failed not for being wrong but for departing from the board's account. The mechanism this study observes in today's exercises was described a generation earlier.
The curriculum documents behind the 1980s and 1990s textbooks stated the aim explicitly. A 1995 primary curriculum went further and forbade the Ideology of Pakistan from being debated at all — the purest possible statement of assessment as compulsion.
KP's Pakistan Studies 10 narrates the 1970 election, the East Pakistan deadlock, the imposition of martial law, nationalisation, Islamisation and the Afghan Jihad — and contains zero evaluation verbs and zero open-opinion prompts in the entire volume. Its learning outcomes are Explain, Discuss, Identify, Comprehend and Analyse; its assessment is recall of dates. Content analysis would score this book as relatively open. Assessment analysis scores it closed.
This study previously reported that open inquiry collapses at matriculation. Completing the class-10 tier shows that is wrong as stated: Punjab's English 10 sets 22 open-opinion prompts, the most of any book in the corpus, and Sindh's sets 5. Every one of them is on a personal, scientific or literary topic — climate change, social media, space travel, a lottery win. The class-10 books that carry the national narrative set none at all. Openness is not absent at matriculation; it is allocated away from contested national questions.
Sindh teaches government, local government, elections and the media in a democracy at class 6, then the 1973 Constitution, the UDHR, the CRC and civil society at class 7. It is the only board to state civilian control of the armed forces, to teach protest and boycott as legitimate citizen action, and to tell a pupil the voting age and how to register.
Sindh's assessment demands evaluation where other boards demand reproduction: pupils are asked to rate how well the current government is fulfilling its purpose, and to critically evaluate the state of human rights in Pakistan. This is the corpus's strongest counter-case to the assessment-demand argument, and it shows the pattern elsewhere is a choice rather than a necessity.
A Punjab geography book printed in March 2022, under the Single National Curriculum, describes equatorial peoples in nineteenth-century racial language — and returns to the material in a multiple-choice question eight pages later.
Punjab's six science books and eight readers contain no Muslim-scientist material at all, where Sindh and KP carry it across seven or eight books each. But the strand survives in Punjab's History 7, in a section on the Golden Age of Islam. It changed subject, not curriculum.
Sindh's 232-page Social Studies 6 has no early Islam, no Muhammad bin Qasim, no Mughals, no colonial era, no Pakistan Movement and no 1947. History is about 12% of it; civics and economics together are about 40%. The only person given a biographical paragraph is Charles Darwin. Jinnah appears twice, both times as a date exercise. British rule is mentioned once — as a unifier.
Across roughly half a million words of English-medium science from every board there is not one named woman scientist. Rosalind Franklin does not occur in the corpus at all, while Watson and Crick are credited for the structure of DNA in three separate books. Across twelve Urdu-language readers, no woman is credited as the author of any selection.
Across eleven matriculation science volumes and roughly 530,000 words, a woman scientist is named four times, in three books, by two of the four boards. KP's Physics 10 names Marie Curie with her dates and credits Lise Meitner with the theoretical explanation of nuclear fission, printing her portrait. KP's Chemistry 9 names Madam Curie. Punjab's Physics 10 names Marie Curie once. Sindh and Balochistan name no woman scientist in any science volume, and none of the four boards names one below class 9.
Punjab externalises the loss of East Pakistan almost entirely and never mentions the surrender. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa indicts its own military rule. Sindh is the only board in the corpus that prints the word "surrendered".
Punjab's English reader delivers the Two-Nation Theory a year before the History syllabus reaches it, asking pupils at class 7 to explain how the author justifies that Hindus and Muslims were two nations. Across three passes the claim degrades from argued, to stipulated, to eternal.
Balochistan's History 8 assigns fault to Muslim actors for Muslim decline, rejects collective blame for 1857, records Hindu–Muslim joint action, and is openly critical of the Hijrat movement. It is the clearest instance of internal criticism found anywhere in the current corpus.
Punjab's class-6 history instructs pupils to prove a contested theory; Sindh's class-6 social studies tells them most historians reject it. Both are current books, and both are an eleven-year-old's first encounter with how history is decided.
In every board, regardless of curriculum generation, inquiry apparatus falls away at classes 9 and 10 — precisely when pupils are old enough to handle contested questions.
Balochistan carries the highest evaluation-verb density in the corpus — History 8 alone sets 32 — and almost no open-opinion demand. The verbs are attached to conclusions the pupil must reach, including propositions that are historically contested and one the book's own narrative treats as a grievance.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa runs the most religiously saturated curriculum of the scored boards and simultaneously the most open historical narrative — it names its own generals' overreach, prints the 1971 prisoner figure, and treats Kargil as a loss of face. Punjab measures as less religious and more closed, more militarised and more hostile toward Hindus and India.
Four curriculum generations are in print at once. Because Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa share one, they have converged: in Islamiyat at classes 6 and 7 they run what is effectively the same book — same chapters, same memorisation selections, same four historical figures in the same order — and in four science subjects their chapter lists match down to section headings.
Punjab's higher narrative closure survives three vintage-matched comparisons, so it is not an artefact of old books awaiting revision. The boards' older books converge; it is Punjab's recent revision that diverges upward — and Punjab has since reissued class 10 again under a 2026 syllabus.
That claim rests on Sindh's jump from the pluralist end of the scale at class 7 to the hostile end at class 8 — but that is a 2015 provincial book sitting beside an early-2000s federal reprint, not a provincial position. Matched at either generation, the ordering reverses.
KP's Biology 9 is a 2018 book reprinted for academic year 2025–26; its Pakistan Studies 9 is a 2010-approved book printed for 2024–25. Mirror sites and even board listings routinely present print runs as new editions, which inflates how current a curriculum appears.
Balochistan and KP both publish class-10 Pakistan Studies under National Curriculum 2006. Balochistan's teaches the 1973 Constitution as a live rights instrument guaranteeing minority rights, teaches local government with reserved seats for women and minorities, and narrates Benazir Bhutto's two terms as Prime Minister in substantive political detail. KP's ends constitution-making earlier and names no woman in government.
This project originally recorded Balochistan 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 28 volumes shows that phrase in none of them. Classes 6–9 are National Curriculum 2022-23 pilot editions; class 10 is National Curriculum 2006.
Punjab is the only board that puts military martyrdom in an English reader, and its class-6 reader carries three separate martial texts. The same Nishan-e-Haider roll appears in its Urdu reader in the same year — the board is redundant across media at age eleven. Punjab's militarism peaks at the start and falls steadily to matriculation, which is the opposite of the usual assumption that this material arrives as pupils get older.
KP's entire martial load sits in its Urdu reader and stops after class 8. Its English-medium pupils never meet it. Sindh has no military martyr anywhere in its corpus; its only shaheed is a civilian doctor.
The claim that Hindu schoolteachers turned Bengali children against Pakistan appears in all three scored boards, in editions from 2004, 2023 and 2024–25 alike. It is the corpus's most durable sentence-level inheritance and the strongest evidence that these are divergent editions of one older federal text.
On minorities within Pakistan, all boards sit at the tolerant end — the clearest shared positive norm the study found. The West is not an out-group at all: Britain functions as a purely historical adversary.
Punjab scores highest on hostility toward Hindus and India, and among the lowest on hostility toward Pakistani religious minorities. Its Pakistan Studies 9 and 10 are consecutive volumes of a single course scoring at opposite ends of the scale. The pluralism is real but compartmentalised into the citizenship slot; it never reaches the historical narrative.
Across all 112 scored books there are zero genuine occurrences of sati. No book attributes female infanticide to India or Hindus; every "buried alive" in the corpus has Arabia as its subject. But a 1995 Punjab textbook, quoted in published scholarship, stated that "The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things — Hindus did not respect women."
Sindh's Islamiyat applies the full rescue-from-darkness template to a named region, with a keyed multiple-choice question. The region is Europe, not India. The template is portable and assessed; its named target is simply not the subcontinent.
Raja Ram Mohan Roy — the reformer most associated with the abolition of sati — appears in Punjab's Pakistan Studies 9 solely as someone who "used to speak against Muslims out of Muslim hostility". The reform programme is not refuted; it is deleted.
No board explicitly links the idolaters of Makkah to Hindu practice. Punjab's History 6 does place a reductive account of Vedic worship and the Prophet's destruction of the Kaaba idols in consecutive chapters at age eleven, but reserves the words "idols", "false gods" and "infidels" strictly for Makkah. The tightest vocabulary link in the corpus is in Sindh — the board that scores most secular overall.
Every Biology 9 book in the study opens with a Quranic section quoting the same two verses. It is curriculum-mandated, all boards comply, and it survived Punjab's complete rewrite. Only KP extends scripture into physics.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa requires both Islamiyat and a separate 245-page Quranic-studies volume at class 9 — 371 pages of compulsory religious instruction against Punjab's 170 and Sindh's 176, roughly twice either board.
Sindh's classes 6 and 7 are the most secular books anywhere in the corpus — its English readers contain no religious selection at all — and its class 9–10 Pakistan Studies is among the most religious. It climbs further between class 7 and class 10 than any other board.
Sindh's Social Studies 6 presents creation and evolution as two coequal theories, quoting two Quranic verses with surah and verse citation as evidence, then presents natural selection straight on the following pages without resolving the contradiction. The stated learning outcome makes it curriculum-mandated.
Across eleven class-10 biology, chemistry and physics volumes from all four boards — roughly 530,000 words — religious framing is effectively absent, and five of the eleven contain zero religious tokens. This holds across three curriculum generations and all four provinces.
Balochistan's General Science 6, General Science 7, Chemistry 9 and Chemistry 10 return zero religious tokens across a combined 188,923 words. The board is the most secular in the corpus on A1 (1.94), and the result is driven almost entirely by its sciences: eleven of its sixteen scored English-medium books score 1 or 2.
No massacres, no trains, no abductions, in any direction, in any board. Migration appears as a logistical and rehabilitation challenge.
No drain of wealth, no famine, no de-industrialisation; and equally no British-modernisation counter-narrative. The colonial economy is simply not a topic.
No Sikh-era or colonial Punjab in the Punjab books. No 1843 annexation, no Talpurs, not even the Indus Valley as a topic in Sindh's Social Studies 7 and 8. No Bacha Khan, no Khudai Khidmatgars and no Qissa Khwani in KP's class-8 History.
