Lens L2 — Civics, Democracy and Rights

Axis scored: A2 · civic thickness · REVERSE-SCORED (1 = thickest civics, 5 = none). Anchors, per the rubric: 1 = constitution, rights instruments, elections, civil society and dissent all taught · 2 = substantial civic content, some instruments taught · 3 = civic content present but thin or purely institutional · 4 = civic content residual; the state is described, the citizen is not empowered · 5 = no civic content.

Scope. Every book in the corpus that plausibly carries civics: Social Studies / History / Geography (6–8), Pakistan Studies (9–10), and the English readers (6–9). Islamiyat is not scored on A2 — it is used in §6 as a cross-subject carrier. Building on track social studies and track pakistan studies; not repeating their structural findings.

Citation convention. file · PAGE n where n is the ===== PAGE n ===== marker (a PDF page index, typically 1–6 ahead of the printed folio). Two books are native digital text with no markers — history-8-en and pakistan-studies-10-en — and are cited by printed folio. Every verbatim quotation below was re-grepped against its source file, including across line breaks, before inclusion; OCR artefacts are preserved and flagged where they appear. No Urdu-medium source is quoted anywhere.

1. The scored table

A2 means

KP’s English-medium-only mean (dropping the six low-confidence Urdu books) is 3.67, which is the honest number to compare against Punjab’s 4.00 and Sindh’s 3.13.

2. Per-board assessment: what a pupil actually receives

2.1 Sindh (STBB) — the only board that teaches citizenship as a practice

A Sindhi pupil in classes 6 and 7 gets a genuine civics course. Not a chapter — roughly a fifth of each year’s Social Studies book. It covers the machinery (state vs government, federalism, three branches, checks and balances, bicameralism, local government and how it is funded, the Election Commission, political parties), the instruments (the 1973 Constitution’s key principles, Articles 19 and 19(A) quoted verbatim, Article 25-A, the UDHR, the CRC), and — uniquely in this corpus — the citizen’s repertoire of action.

“Democracy means rule by the people. Since all the people cannot rule, they choose from among themselves representatives to rule on their behalf through democratic elections. All adult citizens have the right to participate (vote) in free, fair and regular elections. … The law is supreme and all the citizens are equal in the eyes of law. No one is above the law.” — SS6 PAGE 62

“Contrary to democracy, dictatorship is of a rule by one person. In a dictatorship, people are asked not to think, but to obey and follow him blindly exploiting rights and freedom of speech.” — SS6 PAGE 62

The lead about civilian control of the military is confirmed verbatim, and it is the only such statement in the corpus:

“In a democracy, political control of the armed forces is with the civilian institutions. Therefore, in Pakistan the Federal Government has control and command over the armed forces and the President is the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.” — SS6 PAGE 71

So is protest as legitimate, in a list of ways to participate in public life that runs from voting to street action:

“Signing a petition aimed at getting responsible people to take action. Demonstrating peacefully through marches, boycotts, sit-ins or other forms of protest.” — SS6 PAGE 84

The media unit (Unit 4) is the corpus’s only sustained treatment of press freedom. It prints Articles 19 and 19(A) of the Constitution in full, defines the watchdog role — “the media must keep a watch on the public officials in power and accurately report their actions to the public” (PAGE 94) — insists that “laws must protect the freedom of the media so that it can serve as a public watchdog without fear of punishment” (PAGE 95), names PEMRA and PNNABRO as the regulators, and closes with a responsibility no other book in the corpus assigns to a child: “Raise voices against the attempts to stifle or threaten media.” (PAGE 95).

Class 7 moves from machinery to instruments and to advocacy. Civil society is defined against the state — “The basic role of civil society is to limit and control the power of the state” (PAGE 60, and again as a fill-in-the-blank on PAGE 62) — with the corollary spelled out: “Civil society actors should watch how state officials use their powers. They should raise public concern about any abuse of power.” Citizens’ responsibilities include “understanding the importance of free press, taking action against oppressive and discriminatory policies and understanding the processes of election” (PAGE 49). A nine-step advocacy strategy is taught procedurally and set as an assignment.

Then it stops. Sindh’s class 8 book is a different curricular generation and has no civics at all — the word “citizen” occurs once in 66 pages. Class 9–10 Pakistan Studies restores a rights curriculum but not a participation curriculum: five chapters covering the welfare state, civic life, the UDHR article-by-article, and the complaint institutions (Ombudsman, Women Ombudsperson, Supreme Court Human Rights Cell, Ministry of Human Rights, Sindh’s own Human Rights Department). What returns is the citizen as claimant, not the citizen as voter.

Two counterweights are worth recording. The class 9–10 civic-life chapter is duty-heavy and occasionally authoritarian in tone — “Some people do not realise their responsibility and work against the government or social order and destroy the administrative order of the country” (PAGE 177) — and the Ombudsman’s jurisdiction is stated as explicitly excluding “defence of Pakistan or Military, Naval and Air Force” matters (PAGE 189). Sindh teaches civilian supremacy at class 6 and then, at class 10, prints the carve-out that limits it.

2.2 Punjab (PCTB) — the state described, the citizen never addressed

The lead is confirmed and can be stated precisely. Across six SNC-2022 middle-school social-studies volumes, Punjab teaches the pupil nothing about Pakistan’s government. The three Geography books contain zero constitutional content: every “Constitution” hit in all three is the same map-disclaimer footnote, “AJK Interim Constitution Act, 1974.” The two class-6/7 History books teach democracy only as Athens and Rome, and rights only as Magna Carta and the French Revolution. Only History 8 carries constitutional material, and it is constitutional history — a list of the 1973 Constitution’s salient features sitting alongside 1956 and 1962, with no article cited, no right traced to a remedy, and no court.

The citizen line in every Punjab English reader is duty without right. Class 6’s Good Citizen names duty, responsibility, vigilance and cleanliness and no right at all; class 8’s “Participatory Citizenship” unit is traffic-law obedience plus a poem instructing the reader to “Give your country her due,” whose comprehension question — “How do the laws of our country keep us happy and well?” (PAGE 117) — makes benign law a premise rather than a claim.

Two genuine exceptions deserve credit. Punjab’s single best civic passage is in the class-7 English reader, in a lesson on the media: “Media is known as the fourth pillar of democracy” and “The public read about current events, interpret them and learn to intelligently participate in the political, social and economic affairs of the country” (PAGE 126). And Punjab’s class-9 Pakistan Studies is the only Punjab book that criticises a Pakistani ruler: “the people started agitation against dictatorial rule of president General Muhammad Ayub Khan” (PAGE 48), his 1965 win called “so called Elections”, and the opposition’s response described as a “campaign for the restoration of democracy in the country” (PAGE 49). The class-9 women’s chapter also supplies Punjab’s only exhortation to civic voice — “Only by raising our voice against such injustice and oppression, we will flourish and progress as a society” (PAGE 107) — though the injustice in view is domestic violence, not the state.

Against that, three silences are structural. Punjab’s class-8 History omits martial law from Pakistan’s story entirely (zero hits for martial law, Yahya, Zia, Musharraf, coup) while setting the activity “Use posters to explain the contributions of the Pakistan Army in the War on Terrorism” (folio 94). The 22nd-Amendment sentence is the only place the Election Commission is mentioned in twelve books. And the word petition, as a civic act, occurs nowhere in the Punjab corpus at all — every apparent hit is “competition” or “repetition”.

2.3 KP (KPTBB) — civics smuggled in through the English reader

KP’s middle-school social-studies books show no detectable civics, but this is the corpus’s weakest class of claim: all six are Urdu Nastaliq OCR, and absence there may be extraction failure. The one partial exception is class-8 History, where parliamentary vocabulary (Senate, National Assembly, right to vote, the Eighth Amendment, a vote of confidence) is recoverable inside a political chronology.

KP’s real civics is in English. The class-6 reader contains a complete lesson on democracy — its origin in the failure of monarchy, elections, the five-year cycle, the two houses, the President and Prime Minister, and, notably, the removability of rulers: “If they rule according to the wishes of the people, the people respect them, if not, they are removed” (PAGE 52). Its comprehension questions — “What is the advantage of democratic form of government?”, “What is the disadvantage of monarchy?” — ask an eleven-year-old to compare regime types. The class-9 reader then pairs the Madina Charter with the UDHR and sets the task “Compare Madina Charter with the UN Human Rights Charter.” That is the only teaching of a named international rights instrument anywhere in KP — and it is absent from both KP Pakistan Studies books, neither of which mentions the UDHR once.

KP class 10 is the strongest of the three boards’ non-Sindh Pakistan Studies volumes. It teaches rights supremacy over legislation, minority protection in the Principles of Policy, local government twice (with reserved seats), and the only operational redress mechanism in the corpus — how to write to the Wafaqi Mohtasib on plain paper by ordinary post. It also contains the corpus’s most sustained criticism of Pakistan’s own rulers: Zia’s “total ban … on both freedom of expression and political activities” (PAGE 16) and his “over-extension of his military rule” (PAGE 17); Ayub’s manipulation of the 1965 election against Fatima Jinnah, described in class 9 as “illegal and immoral trickery” (PAGE 87); Musharraf’s 1999 action described as “the overthrow of the elected civilian government” (PAGE 35); and the 2007 lawyers’ movement narrated approvingly — “lawyer community and the civil society launched massive protests … against Musharraf throughout the country” (PAGE 41).

But KP undercuts this in its own class-7 English reader, where protest is introduced only as vandalism, and it never converts narration into a pupil task. And its class-9 Pakistan Studies, printed for 2024–25, still stops at 1971 and never describes the 1973 Constitution at all.

2.4 Balochistan (BTBB) — the constitution taught, the citizen partly addressed

Vintage: classes 6–9 are National Curriculum 2022-23 pilot editions (matched to Punjab’s SNC 2022); class 10 is National Curriculum 2006 (matched to KP and Sindh). The “NCC Inclusive Scheme 2024” recorded in the catalogue appears in none of the books — see lens religion §2.4.

A2 is reverse-scored: 1 is the thickest civics, 5 the thinnest. Only books where civic content is plausibly in scope are scored; a chemistry book is not penalised for lacking a constitution.

Balochistan A2 mean (books in scope): 3.56 (n = 9). The board’s civics is concentrated in Pakistan Studies 10 and almost absent elsewhere — the same concentration pattern seen on A1.

Two things distinguish it. First, it is one of only two boards in the corpus to teach the 1973 Constitution as a currently-operative rights instrument rather than as the end-point of a constitution-making story. Second, it names military intervention in civilian government as a subject of study — “the causes of Military take-over of 12 October 1999” — and narrates the restoration of democracy as a chapter in its own right.

Counter-evidence. The demand attached to that material is weak. Across Pakistan Studies 10 there are three evaluation verbs and zero open-opinion prompts; the pupil is required to comprehend and discuss the military takeover, never to judge it. The civic content is available but not examined as judgement — the pattern set out in full in What the Pupil Must Write.

2.5 Class 10 completion — the matriculation year

A2 is reverse-scored: 1 is the thickest civics, 5 the thinnest. Scored only where civic content is plausibly in scope.

A note on what A2 can and cannot see. KP’s class-10 Pakistan Studies would score better on any instrument that counted civic content, and worse on any instrument that counted civic demand. This axis measures the first and this study measures the second separately, on A3 — where the same book scores 5. Read the two together: the civics is present, and the pupil is never asked to do anything with it.

2.6 Corpus expansion — and the thickest civics in the corpus

Added 23 Aug 2026, with the Federal Board (FBISE / National Book Foundation) entering the study.

A2 is reverse-scored: 1 is the thickest civics, 5 the thinnest.

The finding: the federal baseline is thicker than what the provinces print

FBISE’s Pakistan Studies 10 scores 1 on civic thickness — the only book in the corpus to do so. Against provincial class-10 Pakistan Studies volumes it is not close: Balochistan 2, Punjab 2, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 3, Sindh 3.

That matters more than a single book’s score, because this is the board the provinces are nominally working from. The federal text teaches provincial autonomy, an independent judiciary, and fundamental rights including freedom of belief and worship, as clauses currently in force. Every provincial board produces a thinner version of the same subject at the same class.

Read alongside the corresponding finding on assessment demand, the picture is less encouraging than the score alone suggests. FBISE Pakistan Studies 10 sets 24 evaluation prompts and four open-opinion prompts — genuinely more than most — while its Pakistan Studies 9 sets zero of either. The constitutional material is concentrated in the terminal year, and the ideological material in the year before it, with the demand to judge attached only to the former.

Counter-evidence, at equal prominence. A2 measures civic content, not civic empowerment, and a dense clause-by-clause treatment of a constitution is compatible with a pupil never being asked whether any of it is honoured. Nothing in the federal volume asks that question. The score is accurate and it is not a verdict.

3. Vintage-controlled cross-board comparison

The corpus spans three curricular generations and the naive board ranking is confounded. The vintage-matched comparisons that can be made are these.

(a) 2022-vintage middle-school social studies: Punjab vs KP — no difference. Punjab’s six SNC-2022 volumes score 4, 5, 4, 5, 3, 5 (mean 4.33). KP’s three 2022-vintage volumes — History 6 (2022), History 8 and Geography 8 (2022–23) — score 5, 3, 5 (mean 4.33). Identical. The SNC split did not make Punjab worse than its contemporaries; it made Punjab the same as its contemporaries. The claim that “Punjab’s SNC split eliminated citizenship education from middle school” is true as a description of Punjab, but it is not a Punjab finding: KP’s contemporaneous books have no citizenship education either.

(b) Sindh vs anyone at classes 6–7: confounded, and the confound runs the wrong way. Sindh has no 2022-vintage social-studies book. Its civics comes entirely from Sindh Curriculum 2014/2015 volumes approved in 2016 and 2017 — a generation older than Punjab’s SNC books. So the headline “Sindh teaches civics and Punjab does not” cannot be vintage-controlled, and the uncontrolled version understates the point rather than overstating it: the thickest civics in the corpus is also among the older material, and the newest social-studies books in the corpus (Punjab’s SNC set) are the thinnest. Civic thickness is not tracking recency. Note the contrast with climate change, where track social studies §4.7 found the opposite — coverage tracked edition age, not province.

(c) Classes 9–10, roughly vintage-matched: Sindh 2, KP 3.5, Punjab 3. Sindh’s Pakistan Studies core is a 2004 approval; KP’s is National Curriculum 2006. These are close enough to compare, and Sindh wins clearly. But the margin is not a 2004 feature: internal dating puts Sindh’s decisive chapters 12–13 well after the core (the Ombudsman “for more than three decades”, the 2010 Harassment Act, the Ministry of Human Rights, and a Sindh Human Rights Department established “in the recent past”). Sindh’s rights advantage at matric is an appended modern block bolted onto an obsolete book — the same book that teaches no Pakistani political history after 1974. Punjab’s 9–10 books are the newest of the three (content to 2018) and score no better than KP’s 2006-curriculum ones.

(d) English readers: three vintages, and the oldest teaches the most democracy. KP’s whole 6–9 reader set is National Curriculum 2006; Punjab’s is SNC 2022 / NCP-2023; Sindh’s is an undated SPELT-developed series. Class-6 scores: KP 3, Punjab 4, Sindh 5. This is confounded, but the direction is worth flagging: the only English reader in the corpus that teaches parliamentary democracy is the one built on the oldest curriculum.

Overall, vintage-controlled: Sindh is the only board teaching citizenship, and it does so in two places — a 2014/15-curriculum middle-school course and a post-2010 rights block appended to a 2004 matric book. Punjab and KP are statistically indistinguishable from each other at every matched comparison, and both sit in the 3–5 band.

4. Vertical progression, class 6 → 10

(Per-class figures average that class’s scored books; Sindh’s 6 and 7 rows show the Social Studies score, with the English reader at 5 and 4 respectively.)

Sindh does not accumulate; it front-loads and then loses. A Sindhi pupil’s civic education peaks at age 11–12 and is complete by the end of class 7. Class 8 removes it entirely — constitution, rights, elections, civil society, media, all gone in a single year, because the class-8 book belongs to a different curricular generation. Classes 9–10 restore rights but not participation: the pupil who was taught at class 6 how to vote, how to petition an MNA, how to march and how to assess the government’s performance is taught at class 10 how to lodge a complaint with an ombudsman. The vertical sequence is therefore not cumulative and not even continuous; it is two disconnected civic curricula separated by a void.

Punjab appears once and vanishes, then reappears as history. Democracy is a class-6 word about Athens; rights are a class-7 word about Magna Carta; the constitution is a class-8 list about 1956, 1962 and 1973; and by classes 9–10 the pupil is receiving a regime-by-regime chronicle in which constitutions are made and abrogated by other people. At no point in five years is the reader told that they will one day vote. right to vote returns three hits across twelve books, all historical.

KP is the only board whose civic content genuinely accumulates — from 5 at class 7 to 3 at class 10 — but the accumulation is of institutional description, not capability, and it is delivered by two different subjects that never reference each other (English at 6 and 9, Pakistan Studies at 9 and 10).

5. The discriminator: is the pupil invited to judge the government?

This is where the boards separate most sharply, and the separation is not the same as the A2 ranking.

Sindh asks — four separate pupil-facing prompts, plus a normative licence.

“Work together in groups of four, use a scale to assess how well the current government of Pakistan is fulfilling its purpose. Suggest three things they could do to better fulfill the purposes of government.” — SS6 PAGE 64

“Choose a right or freedom and assess the extent to which it is met in Pakistan.” / “Explain how rights and freedom given in the constitution are ensured and denied through citing everyday examples.” — SS7 PAGE 46 (chapter SLOs)

“Survey your neighborhood and find out how many children in your area are enjoying right to free education?” — SS7 PAGE 51

“Critically evaluate the State of human rights in Pakistan and suggest measures to safeguard them.” — PS PAGE 186

And a licence stated in the book’s own voice, inside the Islamic-welfare-state section:

“The Islamic Welfare State is always accountable to its people. The ruler is not beyond question or criticism.” — PS PAGE 163

Two lesser prompts in the class-8 book survive its curricular generation: “Have those objectives been achieved for which Pakistan came into being?” (PAGE 59) and “How effective is the United Nations?”

Punjab neither asks nor tells, with one exception each way. The one evaluative question about a Pakistani government in twelve Punjab books is:

“iii) In the context of Benazir Bhutto’s both terms as Prime minister, which era was better for people?” — PS10 folio 25

It compares two terms of the same civilian prime minister. Two pages earlier, Zia’s and Musharraf’s coups are stated as neutral facts — “Musharraf overthrew the government of Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif and the National and Provincial Assemblies were dissolved” — and immediately followed by lists of their reforms. The one place a ruler is criticised is authorial, in class-9 Pakistan Studies, on Ayub; the teacher note for that chapter reads only “Inform the students about the important events of President Ayub Khan’s era.” The corpus’s only Punjab text in which a ruler admits error is a Japanese folk tale in the class-7 English reader, in which breaking an unjust law is vindicated and the lord says “I have been very wrong” (PAGE 83, OCR renders I as |).

KP tells but never asks. The lead is confirmed: KP’s Pakistan Studies criticises Zia’s censorship verbatim, and it does considerably more — Ayub’s rigged 1965 election, Musharraf’s overthrow of an elected civilian government, and the 2007 lawyers’ and civil-society protests narrated as legitimate. It is the frankest political history in the corpus. But no exercise, activity or question in either KP Pakistan Studies book asks a pupil to evaluate, rate or argue about any government: evaluate, assess, in your opinion and do you think all return zero. Every task is “discuss”, “write a note”, “what do you know about”, or date-recall. The closest KP comes to a pupil-facing appraisal is in the class-7 English reader’s child-labour lesson: “What does the government do to help child labourers? What happens to those schemes?” (PAGE 173).

Summary: Sindh asks the pupil to judge. KP tells the pupil what to think about past rulers and asks nothing. Punjab does neither.

Related discriminators, for completeness:

6. Cross-subject delivery: does any board teach a civic theme twice?

Three themes traced across subjects. “Delivery” means substantive teaching, not a passing mention.

Theme A — the constitution as a rights instrument

Only Sindh delivers the constitution in more than one subject, and only Sindh quotes an article to a pupil.

Theme B — a named international rights instrument (UDHR / CRC)

• Sindh — three subjects. SS7 sets out the UDHR’s features and introduces the CRC 1989 with a child-rights self-audit table (PAGE 48–49); Pakistan Studies reproduces the UDHR article-by-article across PAGE 182–185 and sets “Compare and contrast rights of citizens under UDHR and 1973 Constitution of Pakistan”; and Islamiyat supplies a parallel Islamic framing — huqooq al-‘ibad as an explicit rights vocabulary from class 6, and at 9–10 a minority-rights guarantee: “for those who do not accept Islam but accept its political system and like to live as a protected minority, Islam guarantees these three rights” (islamiyat-9-10-en).
• KP — one subject, and it is the wrong one. The UDHR appears only in the class-9 English reader. Both Pakistan Studies books return zero hits for “Universal Declaration”; class-10 returns zero hits for “human rights” at all.
• Punjab — effectively nil. One “Do you know?” sidebar in PS9. CRC and Article 25-A: zero occurrences across twelve books.

Theme C — elections and democracy as something the pupil will do

• Sindh — two subjects, and the delivery is procedural. SS6 devotes a chapter to elections (electorate, ECP, political parties, who may vote at 18 and stand at 25/30), runs mock school-council elections, examines “the role of media in the election process”, and asks pupils to identify and address the barriers women face in voting and contesting. SS7 classifies the vote as a political right and teaches how to write to, visit, or phone an elected official. Pakistan Studies uses the school student council as the analogy for representative government (PAGE 173).
• KP — two subjects, and this is the corpus’s genuine second finding. The participatory version is in the class-6 English reader; the historical version is in Pakistan Studies 9 and 10. KP is the only board besides Sindh where a pupil meets democracy as a working system rather than as a date.
• Punjab — two subjects only technically. The class-7 English reader’s media lesson teaches “intelligent participation in the political … affairs of the country” and glosses “electorate”; every other Punjab treatment of elections is third-person history (1937, 1946, 1965, 1970, 1977–2018).

Theme D — rule of law (short trace)

Sindh delivers it three times and in three registers: constitutionally (SS7, via Dicey — “no one is above the law”), institutionally (SS6 — “The law is supreme and all the citizens are equal in the eyes of law”), and religiously (Islamiyat 8 — “It is the duty of every citizen to obey the law”, with the Prophet as the exemplar of equal application). Punjab delivers it once, theologically: “It is based on the idea that Almighty Allah is the source of law” (PS9 PAGE 10) — with the class-8 English poem supplying the affective version, “All the laws that are made / Are laws to keep us happy and well”. KP delivers it once in Pakistan Studies (inside the Ombudsman passage) and twice in English — as prophetic practice at class 8 and as UDHR text at class 9 (“the law is the same for everybody”).

Answer to (d): yes, two boards do. Sindh delivers every civic theme in at least two subjects and some in three. KP delivers democracy and the UDHR in two subjects, but the load falls on the English reader rather than on Pakistan Studies. Punjab delivers no civic theme substantively in more than one subject; its second-subject appearances are single passages in English readers.

7. Notable findings

1. Sindh is the only board that teaches citizenship, and the lead’s specifics all check out — government/local government/elections/media-in-a-democracy at class 6; the 1973 Constitution, UDHR, CRC and civil society “to limit and control the power of the state” at class 7; five civics chapters in Pakistan Studies including the UDHR article-by-article; civilian control of the military stated explicitly; protest, boycott and sit-ins listed as legitimate. All verified verbatim.

2. Punjab’s middle-school civic void is real but is not caused by the SNC split alone. Vintage- matched against KP’s own 2022–23 volumes, Punjab scores identically (4.33 vs 4.33). The split organised the void — Punjab’s subject hours went to History and Geography with no slot for citizenship — but KP, which never split, has the same void.

3. The corpus’s second-best civics is in an English reader. KP’s class-6 Democracy lesson and class-9 UDHR unit are the only civic instruction KP delivers that positions the pupil as anything other than a subject — and neither is in a social-studies book. Any account of KP’s curriculum that reads only History, Geography and Pakistan Studies will conclude, wrongly, that KP teaches no democracy at all.

4. Civic-lexicon density is a trap. Measured as hits per 1,000 words on a fifteen-term civic lexicon, KP’s Pakistan Studies 9 scores 7.82 — the highest in the corpus, above Sindh’s Social Studies 6 (5.95) and 7 (6.03). It is also the book that teaches least: its density is entirely constitution-making history ending in 1971. Punjab’s History 8 scores 6.56 on the same measure and is likewise pure constitutional archaeology. Density measures how often institutions are named; A2 measures whether the pupil is empowered. The two diverge sharply.

5. The evaluate-the-government discriminator sorts the boards differently from A2. On A2 the order is Sindh ≫ Punjab ≈ KP. On willingness to criticise power the order is Sindh (asks the pupil) > KP (tells the pupil, frankly, about Zia, Ayub and Musharraf) > Punjab (one comparative question about two Benazir Bhutto terms, and a class-8 History that omits martial law from Pakistan’s story while assigning an army-appreciation poster project).

6. Duties-without-rights is the settled English-reader pattern in two boards. Punjab’s “Participatory Citizenship” theme resolves to street-cleaning, vigilance and traffic-law obedience; KP’s class-7 civic lesson resolves to not vandalising public property, with protest introduced only as arson. Neither names a single right the citizen holds against the state. Sindh’s readers are equally duty-shaped — the difference is that Sindh teaches the rights elsewhere.

7. The word petition does not occur as a civic act anywhere in the Punjab corpus, and dissent occurs nowhere in Punjab or KP. Sindh teaches both petitioning elected officials and signing petitions, and additionally sets an e-petition exercise for heritage preservation at class 6 (PAGE 57).

8. Sindh’s civic curriculum is bimodal and disconnected. It comes from two sources that do not speak to each other — a competency-based 2014/15 middle-school course and a post-2010 rights block appended to a 2004 matric text — with a curricular void at class 8 between them. Sindh is therefore simultaneously the board that teaches the most civics and the board whose civic sequence is least coherent.

9. Nobody teaches the franchise. Only Sindh tells a pupil the voting age, the age to contest, and how to register (SS6 PAGE 80–81). Punjab and KP between them narrate roughly fifteen elections without once telling the reader they will be a voter.

8. Caveats

1. KP’s class 6–8 History and Geography scores rest on absence in Urdu OCR — the weakest claim permitted under the rubric §4. The extraction recovers Urdu function words well but content words poorly; zero hits for آئین/حقوق/جمہوریت should be read as not established, not as absent. All six of those books carry low confidence and the KP English-medium-only mean (3.67) is the safer figure for comparison.
2. English readers are being scored on an axis built for social studies. A reader with no civics is not failing at its own subject. The English-reader scores are included because the brief asks for them and because they turn out to be where two boards actually deliver civics — but a board’s reader-only mean should not be read as a curricular judgement.
3. Sindh’s Pakistan Studies is one book counted once. pakistan-studies-9-ur and pakistan-studies-10-en are the same combined 9–10 volume in two mediums (see track pakistan studies §1.3). Scoring it twice would inflate Sindh’s book count and distort the mean.
4. The Sindh 9–10 dating is inference. Chapters 12–13 are dated after the 2004 core from internal evidence (the Ombudsman “for more than three decades”, the 2010 Harassment Act, the Ministry of Human Rights, the Sindh HR Department “in the recent past”) plus the imprint’s co-author note — not from an explicit edition statement. The vintage-matched claim in §3(c) depends on it.
5. OCR artefacts are preserved in quotations, including “qf” for “of” (KP English 6), “te” for “to” (KP English 8), “proteceor” for “protector” (KP English 9), “priciples” (Punjab History 7, the book’s own typo) and ”|” for “I” (Punjab English 7). Where a passage was too fused to quote — the UDHR right-to-participate sentence in KP English 9 — it is described, not quoted, and marked as such.
6. Page markers are PDF indices, not printed folios, except the two Punjab native-text books cited by folio. Expect several pages of offset. KP mirror files contain leading advertisement pages.
7. Percentage-of-book figures (Sindh SS6 ~21%, SS7 ~16%, PS ~16%) are page-extent estimates from unit boundaries, not word counts.
8. The civic-lexicon density figures in §7.4 count fifteen strings (constitution, citizen, democra*, election, electorate, fundamental right, human right, rule of law, parliament, national assembly, senate, franchise, civil society, ballot) per 1,000 whitespace-delimited tokens. They are ordinal and OCR-sensitive; they are quoted to make a point about their own unreliability as a civics proxy, not as a measurement.
9. This lens covers classes 6–10 only and only the books listed in §1. Claims that a board “never teaches” something are bounded by that range and by the extraction quality of the relevant file.