Annotated bibliography · 1988–2018

The literature this project stands on

This is not a new field. 20 works are catalogued here, the earliest from 1988, and every one of them shaped the method or supplies something this corpus cannot. Each entry says what it argues and what it means for the findings on this site — including where it covers ground this project had to leave out.

Why this page exists

A study that presents itself as the first look at a question a dozen scholars have already examined is either uninformed or misleading. The most important charges made on this site — that the curriculum insists on an ideology of Pakistan, that it glorifies war, that it omits minorities — were made in print in 2003 by Nayyar and Salim, and in some cases in 1988 by Kazi. What is new here is the corpus and the instrument: four provincial boards and the Federal Board read side by side after devolution, on books currently in print, with a rubric fixed before scoring and every claim traceable to a page.

Two entries below deserve particular attention because they mark the boundaries of this project rather than support it. Rahman's study of Urdu-medium world view covers the material this corpus can describe but never quote, and most Pakistani pupils are taught in that medium. Nosheen Ali's account of the Northern Areas textbook dispute is the strongest available argument that pupils and communities are not passive recipients of what they are handed — which is the central limitation of content analysis, this project included.

Almost none of these works are hosted here.

Several carry explicit reservations of rights — the SDPI reports state that no part may be reproduced without the publisher's written permission — and this project applies the same rule to scholarship that it applies to the textbooks: catalogue in full, link where a stable link exists, never republish. Where a DOI or publisher URL is printed in the document itself it is given below. Where no link is recorded, the citation is complete enough to find the work through a library or the publisher; a URL is not invented to fill the field. One exception is marked below: Nosheen Ali's article carries an explicit Creative Commons licence and is served here in full.

The bibliography 20

In order of publication. Report · Journal article · Book chapter · Monograph · Thesis · Working paper.

1988 Journal article

Ethnic Nationalities, Education, and Problems of National Integration in Pakistan

Aftab A. Kazi

Asian Profile, volume 16 number 2, pages 147–161

The oldest study in this library, and roughly contemporaneous with the 1980s editions in the historical layer. Argues that curriculum was used as an instrument of national integration against ethnic-national identity — the question behind this project's provincial comparison.

Bearing on this study: Contemporary with the historical books; frames the province-versus-centre axis.

1995 Report

Language Planning and Politics in Pakistan

Tariq Rahman

Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Research Report Series 9

First of six Rahman studies held here. Establishes language policy as the contested ground it remains — the reason this project records medium of instruction on every book and treats Urdu-medium and English-medium material as different objects.

Bearing on this study: Why medium is a variable, not a detail.

1998 Report

Language-Teaching Policies in Pakistan

Tariq Rahman

Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Research Report Series 14

Policy-level companion to the world-view study below.

Bearing on this study: Language policy background.

1998 Report

Language-Teaching and World View in Urdu Medium Schools in Pakistan

Tariq Rahman

Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Research Report Series 15

The single most important item here for this project's largest blind spot. This corpus can only quote English-medium material, while most Pakistani pupils are taught in Urdu; Rahman read the Urdu-medium world view directly. Where this project says 'not established' about an Urdu absence, this is the work to consult instead.

Bearing on this study: Covers the gap this project cannot: the Urdu-medium world view.

1998 Report

Language-Teaching in Pakistani Madrassas

Tariq Rahman

Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Research Report Series 16

The madrassa sector, which this project does not cover at all. Included so that the boundary of this corpus is visible rather than implied.

Bearing on this study: Marks a sector outside this corpus.

1998 Report

Language, Knowledge and Inequality

Tariq Rahman

Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Research Report Series 20

Connects medium of instruction to class stratification — the mechanism by which an English-medium and an Urdu-medium pupil in the same province receive materially different educations. Load-bearing for the socio-economic strand of the implications analysis.

Bearing on this study: Medium as a class mechanism.

1999 Working paper

Language Acquisition and Power: A Theoretical Framework

Tariq Rahman

Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Working Paper Series 45

The theoretical statement underlying the five reports above.

Bearing on this study: Theory behind the Rahman series.

2003 Report

The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan — Urdu, English, Social Studies and Civics

A. H. Nayyar and Ahmad Salim (editors)

Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Islamabad

The foundational study in this field, and the direct ancestor of this project. It read the national curriculum documents and textbooks together, and established the method of quoting curriculum objectives against the textbook passages written to satisfy them. Its central charges — insistence on an ideology of Pakistan, glorification of war, incitement against religious minorities, and omission of minority contributions — are the hypotheses the present corpus was assembled to re-test on the current books, more than twenty years on.

Bearing on this study: Sets the questions. Where this project's findings diverge from it, the divergence is itself a finding about curricular change.

2003 Thesis

Curriculum as Destiny: Forging National Identity in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh

Yvette Claire Rosser

PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin

Comparative across three national curricula, which is the control this project cannot supply from inside Pakistan alone. Its argument that each state's textbooks are built around a founding grievance is the frame behind this project's narrative-closure axis (A4).

Bearing on this study: Supplies the regional comparison this corpus lacks.

2003 Monograph

Becoming a Modern Nation: Educational Discourse in the Early Years of Ayub Khan (1958–64)

Rubina Saigol

Council of Social Sciences, Pakistan

Reads the education discourse of the first military government. Establishes that the framing this project measures in current books has a datable origin rather than being perennial.

Bearing on this study: Origin-dating for the national narrative.

2003 Book chapter

History, Social Studies and Civics and the Creation of Enemies

Rubina Saigol

In S. Akbar Zaidi (editor), Social Science in Pakistan in the 1990s, Council of Social Sciences, Pakistan

The direct precedent for this project's othering lens (A6) and for the cross-subject method: it reads history, social studies and civics together rather than separately, on the argument that the enemy figure is assembled across subjects rather than stated in any one of them.

Bearing on this study: The methodological precedent for cross-subject thread analysis.

2004 Journal article

Islam, Democracy and Citizenship Education: An Examination of the Social Studies Curriculum in Pakistan

Iftikhar Ahmad

Current Issues in Comparative Education, Long Island University

Traces the citizenship-education mission from the 1980s Islamisation policy forward, and sets out the competing liberal-democratic and theocratic reform agendas. Directly relevant to this project's civic-thickness axis (A2).

Bearing on this study: Historical context for the civics findings.

2006 Monograph

The State and the Limits of Counter-Terrorism: The Case of Pakistan and Sri Lanka

Rubina Saigol

Council of Social Sciences, Pakistan

Connects education policy to security policy, with a comparative case. Relevant to the militarism axis (A5) and to the forward-looking argument about what curricula imply.

Bearing on this study: Militarism axis; the implications argument.

2008 Journal article

Outrageous State, Sectarianized Citizens: Deconstructing the 'Textbook Controversy' in the Northern Areas, Pakistan

Nosheen Ali

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, issue 2 (2008)

A case study of what happens when a community rejects the textbooks it is given — the Gilgit-Baltistan curriculum dispute. It is the strongest available corrective to reading textbooks as if they were received passively, which is the central limitation of every content analysis including this one.

Bearing on this study: The counter-case to textbook determinism. Cited in the limits sections.

Download (PDF) — hosted here because the work carries an open licence: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0, stated on the article's own title page.

http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/1172 · doi:10.4000/samaj.1172

2011 Report

Connecting the Dots: Education and Religious Discrimination in Pakistan — A Study of Public Schools and Madrassas

A. H. Nayyar

United States Commission on International Religious Freedom

Extends the 2003 work to the provincial boards after the 18th Amendment devolved curriculum, and adds madrassa material. Useful here for its province-by-province treatment, which is the axis this project is organised on.

Bearing on this study: Closest predecessor for cross-province comparison.

2011 Journal article

Content Analysis of Textbooks of Social and Pakistan Studies for Religious Tolerance in Pakistan

Safdar Rehman Ghazi, Gulap Shahzada and Ismail Khan

Asian Social Science, volume 7 number 5

A quantitative content analysis of the same subject family this project reads, published from a Pakistani university. Methodologically the nearest comparison to the lens scoring used here.

Bearing on this study: Method comparison for the religion and othering lenses.

2012 Thesis

English Language Textbooks Evaluation in Pakistan

Asma Aftab

PhD thesis, University of Birmingham

Book-length evaluation of the English readers specifically, including the curriculum-to-textbook production process. The most detailed treatment available of the subject this project covers in its English track.

Bearing on this study: Depth on the English readers.

2014 Report

Education Reform in Pakistan

International Crisis Group

Asia Report No. 257, 23 June 2014

Policy and political-economy framing: who controls curriculum after devolution, why reform stalls, and how provincial boards actually operate. The institutional background this project's content findings sit inside.

Bearing on this study: Explains the machinery that produces the books.

2016 Report

Feminism and the Women's Movement in Pakistan: Actors, Debates and Strategies

Rubina Saigol

Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Country Study

Background for the gender axis (A7), and for reading textbook depictions of women against the actual movement history the books omit.

Bearing on this study: Gender axis context.

2018 Journal article

Historical Revisionism in Pakistani Textbooks: A Case Study of Public School Curriculum

Fatima Ebadat Khan

Scholedge International Journal of Multidisciplinary & Allied Studies, volume 5 issue 8, pages 89–98

Recent treatment of how the historical account is revised between editions — the question the historical layer of this catalogue exists to test.

Bearing on this study: Directly relevant to the historical layer.

doi:10.19085/journal.sijmas050801

What this bibliography does not contain

It is a working library, not a survey of the field. It holds what was consulted while building this study, and it over-represents work available in open digital form — which is itself a bias, since Pakistani-published scholarship and Urdu-language scholarship are systematically harder to obtain than English-language work published abroad. Anyone extending this project should treat that as the first gap to close.

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