Social Studies / History / Geography (Classes 6–8): Comparative Analysis of Punjab (PCTB), Sindh (STBB), and KP (KPTBB) Textbooks

Sources analyzed (paths relative to extracted-text/):

Citation convention: “p.N” is the ===== PAGE N ===== marker in the extracted file, i.e. the Nth page of the source PDF, which typically runs a few pages ahead of the printed folio. PCTB History 8 is native text with no page markers; it is cited by printed folio from its table of contents. All verbatim quotations in this report are from English-medium Punjab and Sindh books only, and every one has been re-grepped against its source file. KP material is Urdu OCR and is reported as theme and structure only — never quoted.

1. Per-book profiles

1.1 STBB Sindh, Class 6 — Social Studies (integrated, English)

• Edition: “Prepared and developed by the Sindh Textbook Board, Jamshoro and approved by the Education and Literacy Department, Government of Sindh vide letter No. SO(G-1) E & L/CURRICULUM-2014 dated 7th December, 2016” (p.2). This is a Sindh Curriculum 2014 book, explicitly written to replace National Curriculum 2006, which the preface faults because “the this curriculum did not develop critical…” thinking (p.4).
• Units (10): 1 World-View, Society and Civilization · 2 The Indus Valley Civilization · 3 Governing Ourselves (Government; Federal Government; Local Government; Elections) · 4 The Media (Forms and Roles; The Media in a Democratic Society; Imperfections of the Media) · 5 Land and People of South Asia · 6 Population · 7 Economic Choice (Why Do We Choose; Alternatives and Trade-offs; Opportunity Cost) · 8 Production of Goods and Services (p.169) · 9 Individuals in South Asian Societies · 10 Skill Development (inquiry, history, map skills).
• Scope: an integrated civics + geography + economics + ancient-history course. History is confined to Units 1–2 (origins of human life, beginning of civilization, then a four-chapter Indus Valley unit: land and people, art and architecture, tools/technology/trade, and the end of the civilization, pp.25–39).
• Civics is the spine of the book, not an add-on: a four-chapter unit on government (state vs government, federal/democratic/parliamentary features, local government and its funding, elections) plus an entire four-chapter unit on the media in a democratic society including its “imperfections”. Nothing equivalent exists anywhere in the Punjab or KP class 6–8 corpus.
• Sindh foregrounding: the preface states the geography strand will “focus on the land that is Pakistan especially Sindh” (p.3), and Moen-jo-Daro anchors the whole Indus unit (pp.30–39). But the geography that follows is South Asia-scale, not Sindh-scale — Sindh occurs only 26 times in 232 pages.
• Climate change is absent as a topic. “Global warming” appears once, incidentally, in a passage on fishing (p.130); there is no environment or climate unit. This is the single largest content gap versus Punjab’s geography volumes.
• Colonial era, Pakistan Movement, Mughals and Muslim conquest are entirely absent from this grade.

1.2 STBB Sindh, Class 7 — Social Studies (integrated, English)

• Edition: Sindh Provincial Curriculum 2015; approval dated 06-12-2017; 196 pp.
• Units (6 + 1 un-listed): 1 From Ancient to Modern World (Ancient India p.6; Persia p.16; transition to the modern world p.25) · 2 The Constitution and Citizenship (Constitution p.40; Citizenship Rights and Responsibilities p.46; Civil Society and Active Citizenship p.58) · 3 Land and Life in Asia (p.64; people and land p.78; water resources p.88; migration p.108) · 4 Demand and Supply (p.127, p.139) · 5 Organisation of People in Asia (leadership p.150; response to crises p.156; rights and responsibilities p.165) · 6 Skill Development (pp.173–192) · an un-TOC’d Chapter 7 “Violence” (pp.193–196).
• A genuine civics core: the 1973 Constitution, fundamental rights, the Supreme Court’s role, UDHR 1948, the Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989, Article 25-A and “compulsory education to all” (p.51), a nine-step advocacy method, and civil society framed as existing to “limit and control the power of the” state (p.60).
• Micro-economics at grade 7 — demand and supply schedules and curves, substitutes, producer focus — which no other board attempts at this level.
• Climate change is explicit: “Earth’s climate is destabilizing because of the rising atmospheric absorptions of carbon dioxide” (p.80), sea-level rise, cyclones (p.86).
• Sindh appears operationally rather than ceremonially: the 2010 flood and Tori Bund breach (p.98) and the 2001 Sindh drought (p.105) are used as worked case material.
• A child-protection chapter on violence (good touch / bad touch / saying no), absent from the table of contents and without parallel in any other board’s class 6–8 books.
• Absent: Indus Valley (taught in class 6 instead), Muhammad bin Qasim, Delhi Sultanate, Mughals, British rule, Pakistan Movement. 1947 appears only as migration case material.

1.3 STBB Sindh, Class 8 — Social Studies (integrated, English)

• A different curricular generation from its own class-7 companion. This is an old federal Middle School Project text translated from Urdu and reprinted, not a Sindh Curriculum 2014/15 book. Its preface is the generic STBB one about “the challenges of new millennium” (p.4). Content is early-2000s and spot-updated.
• Chapters (10): 1 The Universe · 2 The Division of Land and Water on the Earth · 3 Major Climatic Regions of the World · 4 World Resources · 5 Population of the World · 6 Means of Communication of the World and Pakistan · 7 [Tourism — chapter title lost to OCR in the contents table, recovered from body content on travellers and tourism, p.52] · 8 Ideology of Pakistan · 9 The United Nations · 10 Harmful Effects of Smoking and Narcotics.
• Not truncated. The 66-page file runs through to the class-10 health material of Chapter 10 and ends on the book’s own closing health message; the short length is the book’s, not the extraction’s.
• All of the board’s history-and-ideology load for classes 6–8 sits in one chapter (Ch.8, pp.52–59), covering the ideology of Pakistan, 1857, and the freedom movement to 1947 in roughly eight pages.
• The book opens theologically: “Allah Almighty has created this Earth, the Sun, the Moon, and the planets for the benefit of mankind” (p.4).
• Climate change is absent; constitution, rights and civics are absent — both central to its own class-7 companion.

1.4 PCTB Punjab, Class 6 — History

• Edition: SNC 2022, Experimental Edition; 104 pp. Cover carries the SNC branding “ONE NATION, ONE CURRICULUM”.
• Chapters (4): 1 Ancient Civilizations (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus, China) pp.3–39 · 2 Persian, Greek and Roman Civilizations pp.40–58 · 3 Aryans, Kushans and Guptas pp.59–80 · 4 Rise of Islamic Civilization pp.81–102 · Glossary pp.103–104.
• The book stops at roughly 661 CE. Mughal, British, colonial, Quaid, 1947 and Pakistan Movement do not occur at all. Roughly half is world civilizations, a quarter subcontinent, a fifth early Islam (Ch.4 is largely devotional — the Prophet’s life and the four Rashidun caliphs).
• Punjab-specific history is absent — three passing mentions (Alexander in “the Punjab” p.55; Kanishka p.71; an eastern Kushan capital p.73).
• Hinduism is never named as a religion. The Vedic religion is reduced to a sentence-level description; Buddhism, by contrast, is treated warmly through Ashoka (pp.69–70).
• The Aryan-invasion thesis is taught as settled fact, with race language. Page 60 discusses the term Aryan being used to refer to a “race” and as a “superiorrace” [sic]; p.30 sets students the task of justifying that the Indus Valley people were easily defeated by the Aryans.

1.5 PCTB Punjab, Class 6 — Geography

• Edition: SNC 2022, printed 1 March 2022; 89 pp.
• Units (6): Structure of Earth and Types of Rocks pp.4–22 · Mountains, Plateaus and Valleys pp.23–35 · Climatic Regions of the World pp.36–48 · Forests of the World pp.49–61 · Natural Disasters pp.62–76 · Changing Earth and Human Activity pp.77–88.
• Overwhelmingly physical geography. There is no population or demography unit at all, and no dedicated economy unit.
• Strong technical skills strand: GIS, remote sensing, GPS, Google Maps and cartography (pp.19–20).
• Climate change is explicit and current: the 2022 floods are attributed to global warming and Karachi heat waves are discussed (p.69), alongside forest-cover targets and the 3Rs (pp.58, 70, 73).
• Colonial-era racial ethnography is reproduced as fact in the climatic-regions unit (pp.39–42) — see §4.3.
• Punjab examples are frequent (Khewra, Potwar, Changa Manga, Murree, Lahore) but there is no Punjab-titled section.

1.6 PCTB Punjab, Class 7 — History

• Edition: SNC 2022, printed January 2023; ~108 pp; print run 1,411,460.
• Chapters (5): 1 Middle Ages in Europe (500–1500) pp.3–24 · 2 Spread of Islam in Europe and Asia (Umayyads, Abbasids) pp.25–39 · 3 Muslim Dynasties and the Crusades pp.40–57 · 4 Muslims in South Asia (Delhi Sultanate, Mughals) pp.58–91 · 5 Modern Period in Europe (Renaissance, Enlightenment) pp.92–107.
• Balance is roughly 40 pp Europe, 33 pp world-Islamic, 34 pp subcontinent — Punjab is the only board that gives medieval and early-modern Europe substantial space at this grade.
• The Rashidun era is not taught here (one mention, p.25) and Muslim Spain is nearly absent — a single paragraph on Abdul Rahman (p.31), no Tariq bin Ziyad, and the Battle of Tours framed from the European side (p.9).
• Mahmud of Ghazni is sanitized: his invasions are given purely political motives (p.60); Somnath and the temple raids do not appear. Ghori, by contrast, is given an explicitly religious motive (see §4.1).
• Akbar is praised administratively but Din-i-Ilahi is framed as a deviation corrected by Mujaddid Alf Sani (p.76); Aurangzeb is presented as a pious ideal (p.84) with jizya, temple policy and Dara Shikoh all absent.
• No Sikh period, no Ranjit Singh, no colonial Punjab. Noor Jahan is the only woman profiled.

1.7 PCTB Punjab, Class 7 — Geography

• Edition: SNC 2022; ~90 pp.
• Chapters (6): 1 Plains and Rivers pp.4–17 · 2 Water Sources and Management pp.18–30 · 3 Settlements and Land Use pp.31–45 · 4 Agriculture pp.46–61 · 5 Climate Change pp.62–74 · 6 Minerals and Power pp.75–90.
• About 60% human and economic geography, with real statistics: agriculture at 22.7% of GDP and 37.4% of the labour force (p.51), 83% of cultivable area canal-dependent (p.50), the 2017 census at 63% rural / 37% urban (p.43), plus Reko Diq, Thar, Sui and Khewra.
• The climate chapter is dated in its diplomacy: the only international action named is Copenhagen 2009 — no Paris Agreement, no COP series — even though the 2022 floods and 2021 heat wave are present (p.69) and Pakistan’s climate-risk ranking is cited (p.69).
• Watermark damage is heavier here than in the History volume; the printed titles of Chapters 2 and 4 are unrecoverable.

1.8 PCTB Punjab, Class 8 — History (native digital text — highest fidelity)

• Edition: “Based on Single National Curriculum 2022”, Experimental Edition; 94 printed pp. Authors Dr. Rashid Hameed and Mr. Atta-ur-Rehman; the reviewer panel includes Prof. Anjum James Paul, a Christian educator.
• Chapters (5, printed folios): 1 Arrival of the British in the Subcontinent p.1 · 2 Reform Movements in the Subcontinent p.16 · 3 World Wars I and II p.28 · 4 Political Awakening in the Subcontinent p.43 · 5 Pakistan a New Country: 1947 till Today p.74.
• This one book carries the entire colonial-and-Pakistan-Movement narrative for the Punjab 6–8 sequence. It is also the only book in the corpus with a full world-history chapter at this level (Versailles, the rise of dictatorship, the League of Nations, both world wars, the UN and its agencies, SEATO/CENTO).
• Partition violence is essentially absent — migration appears only as millions of Muslim families migrating; there are no massacres, trains, abductions or deaths in either direction.
• The Two-Nation Theory is attributed to Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, named “Father of the Pakistan Movement” (p.20), and separately to Iqbal at Allahabad (p.55).
• British framing is double-edged: conquest by conspiracy and post-1857 vengefulness, yet Sir Syed’s loyalty to the British is presented approvingly (p.21). There is no economic critique of colonialism (no drain of wealth, famine or deindustrialization) and equally no railways/modernization narrative.
• Chapter 5 jumps from 1971 to the Afghan War and army operations: no Bhutto, no Zia, no Musharraf, no post-1971 civilian politics, but six named army operations through Radd-ul-Fassad (2017).
• Counterweight: a warm section on Christian, Parsi and scheduled-caste support for Pakistan naming S.P. Singha, C.E. Gibbon and Jogendra Nath Mandal, plus a dedicated section on women of the Pakistan Movement (Fatima Jinnah, Fatima Sughra, Begum Shaista Ikramullah, Begum Ra’ana, Jahan Ara Shahnawaz).

1.9 PCTB Punjab, Class 8 — Geography

• Edition: SNC 2022, Experimental, Impression 1; 89 pp.
• Chapters (6): 1 Oceans and Seas pp.4–15 · 2 Living with Climate pp.16–33 · 3 Environmental Pollution pp.34–45 · 4 Industrialization and Trade pp.46–58 · 5 Transport and its Importance pp.59–77 · 6 Social and Economic Development pp.78–88.
• Roughly 40/60 physical to human. Again no population or demography chapter — urbanization enters only via industrialization (pp.47–48), repeating the silence in Geography 6.
• The most climate-forward book in the corpus: 47 mentions of climate change and 38 of global warming; the 2015 Karachi heatwave, Thar drought, 2022 floods and the January 2022 Murree snowstorm; Paris 2015 named (p.41); an energy mix table (p.25). One discordant “Diverging Views of Global Warming” passage (p.24) tells students warming is not a major issue to most people.
• Economy-heavy: textiles at ~60% of exports (p.50), trade tables, per-capita income, HDI ranking, and CPEC/Gwadar framed glowingly (p.74).
• India appears almost solely through “INDIAN ILLEGALLY OCCUPIED JAMMU & KASHMIR” map labels (pp.49, 67, 70) — the volume’s one overtly ideological feature.

1.10 KPTBB KP, Class 6 — History (Urdu; theme-grade)

• Printed 2022; 104 pp; authors from a Government Postgraduate College, Swabi. Cover states the span 2500 BC – 1526 AD.
• Chapters (5): 1 Indus Valley Civilization p.5 · 2 Aryans, Ancient Religions and Empires (including Gandhara) p.22 · 3 Arrival of the Muslims in India, 711–1290 p.48 · 4 Khiljis to the Decline of the Delhi Sultanate, 1290–1526 p.69 · 5 Sufism and the Delhi Sultanate’s Intellectual and Cultural Contributions p.88.
• Notably ecumenical pre-Islamic chapters: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism are each described sympathetically with their festivals, plus an explicit comparative table (pp.34–35) — the direct opposite of Punjab History 6, which never names Hinduism as a religion.
• KP heritage is woven through: Gandhara via Peshawar, Charsadda, Taxila and Swat (pp.35–36); the Butkara stupa; Ashoka’s edicts at Shahbazgarhi (Mardan) and Mansehra (p.41); the Kushan capital at Peshawar; Alexander’s Indus crossing at Hund, Swabi (p.38); the Lodhis’ Afghan identity emphasized (p.78).
• Razia Sultana is treated sympathetically at length, her fall blamed on the nobles’ refusal to accept a woman ruler (pp.60–61).
• Muhammad bin Qasim is idealized and Sindh presented as “Bab-ul-Islam”; Mahmud of Ghazna is framed both as idol-breaker (Somnath 1025 itemized, pp.53–55) and as patron of Firdausi and Al-Biruni.
• Carries the mandated Khatm-e-Nabuwwat declaration page (p.104).

1.11 KPTBB KP, Class 6 — Geography (Urdu; theme-grade)

• Post-2017 edition; 135 pp; authors from the University of Peshawar Geography department.
• Chapters (8): 1 Solar System and the Earth p.2 · 2 Maps p.17 · 3 Earth’s Spheres and Human–Environment p.36 · 4 Rocks p.49 · 5 Landforms of the World p.60 · 6 Physical Features of Pakistan p.88 · 7 Population p.100 · 8 Human Settlements p.115.
• Has both a full cartography chapter and a full population chapter — the two things Punjab’s Geography 6 and 8 both lack. The population chapter uses the 2017 census (~207m, roughly sixfold growth since 1951), provincial density tables, age/sex structure, urbanization and internal migration including 2005 earthquake displacement.
• Time zones and Pakistan Standard Time, contour lines and layer tinting (pp.26–31).
• World-city profiles cover Karachi, Mumbai, Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, London and Makkah (pp.122–128). Peshawar is never profiled as a city, though KP surfaces as the dense Peshawar-valley population zone (pp.107–108).

1.12 KPTBB KP, Class 7 — History (Urdu; theme-grade)

• National Curriculum 2006; NOC 07-10-2010; printed 2020-21; 101 pp.
• Chapters (5): 1 Foundation of the Mughal Empire — Babur, Humayun, Sher Shah Suri p.6 · 2 Akbar to Aurangzeb p.18 · 3 Mughal Religious Tolerance, Society and Culture p.41 · 4 Decline and the Later Mughals p.56 · 5 Muslim Reform Movements, British Ascendancy and 1857 p.75.
• Strictly 1526–1857 and roughly 95% subcontinent, with zero world-Islamic history — a completely different slice of the past from Punjab History 7, which spends 40 pp on Europe and covers the Umayyads, Abbasids and Crusades.
• A Pashtun thread runs throughout: Sher Shah Suri’s Afghan Sur dynasty treated at length and admiringly (the Bengal-to-Peshawar trunk road, land survey, sarais, pp.13–15); Ahmad Shah Abdali honoured as founder of independent Afghanistan (pp.63, 76); Khushal Khan Khattak and Rahman Baba named as the great poets of the era (p.46) — the only vernacular poets named anywhere in the corpus; Syed Ahmad Barelvi’s movement at Akora Khattak (1826) and his death at Balakot (1831) (pp.85–86); 1857 reprisals at Nowshera (pp.91–92).
• Nur Jahan is given an unusually long treatment as a political actor (pp.26–28).
• Aurangzeb is sympathetic; jizya is explained as a shariah levy; Marathas, Sikhs and Jats appear as rebels sapping the empire. 1857 is “the War of Independence”, and its aftermath is framed as targeted persecution of Muslims and engineered communal division — an explicit proto-Pakistan grievance arc.

1.13 KPTBB KP, Class 7 — Geography (Urdu; theme-grade)

• Same 2006-curriculum series; 161 pp — the longest book in the corpus; no recoverable imprint page.
• Chapters (11): 1 Structure of the Earth p.2 · 2 Denudation p.23 · 3 The Atmosphere p.36 · 4 Temperature p.49 · 5 Air Pressure and Winds p.61 · 6 Humidity and Precipitation p.74 · 7 Agriculture p.87 · 8 Minerals and Energy p.100 · 9 Industries p.119 · 10 Trade p.130 · 11 Transport p.143.
• A clean split: Chapters 1–6 are systematic physical geography, 7–11 the economic geography of Pakistan. No population, settlement or map-skills chapter here — those sit in the class 6 volume, so KP’s geography sequence is genuinely cumulative across grades.
• A strong environmental thread for a 2006-curriculum book: the ozone hole and CFCs, the greenhouse effect, deforestation, mining pollution, and waterlogging and salinity (pp.30–31, 43–46, 96, 103).
• KP economic hooks are dense: Gadoon-Amazai industrial estate, Swabi (p.120); Karak gas (p.111); Orakzai coal (p.112); Swat/Mingora emeralds (p.107); Warsak dam (p.113); Bannu woollens (p.124); Peshawar-valley rice and sugarcane at Mardan and Charsadda (p.92).

1.14 KPTBB KP, Class 8 — History (Urdu; theme-grade)

• Academic year 2022-23; approval correspondence dated 2022; Directorate of Curriculum and Teacher Education, Abbottabad. 59 pp.
• Not truncated. The file terminates on the standard KPTBB back-matter colophon bearing the print code (66-37-133-2223) (p.59) — the book itself is simply short.
• Recoverable arc: the 1857 War of Independence and its aftermath (pp.6–10); Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s educational, social and political services (pp.12–17); post-1857 British rule and Muslim educational disadvantage (pp.16–17); the All-India Muslim League and the Lahore Resolution of 23 March 1940 with Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman’s seconding (pp.30–33, 37); the Objectives Resolution of March 1949 (p.38); Kashmir and the UN Security Council resolutions of 1948 (p.41); Liaquat Ali Khan (p.44); the accession of the princely states including Hyderabad and Junagadh; the partition of Bengal into east and west; the 1971 war, its causes and events (pp.~50+); and sanctions against Pakistan in a later chapter.
• So KP, like Punjab, delivers the whole colonial-to-Pakistan narrative at class 8 — but KP carries it past 1947 to 1971 and beyond within the same grade, where Punjab’s class 8 leaps from 1971 straight to army operations.

CORRECTION (added on cross-check by the history lens, lens history §13). The arc described above understates the book’s reach: it does not stop at 1971. A numeral probe of the same file returns 1971, 1973, 1977, 1988, 1999, 2008, 2018 and 2022, with Bhutto, Zia, Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan all present. KP History 8 is the most current history text in the corpus — it runs to the 2022 no-confidence vote, further than any Punjab or Sindh volume. The “59 pp.” figure is also misleading: the scan is a two-up spread, so the real book is roughly 115 printed pages. Both points matter for vintage control, because they make KP’s class-8 slot a modern book, not a short legacy one.

1.15 KPTBB KP, Class 8 — Geography (Urdu; theme-grade)

• NOC dated 16-07-2022; academic year 2022-23. 49 pp — the shortest book in the corpus.
• Not truncated: ends on the KPTBB colophon with print code (30-107-2223).
• Recoverable topics: the role of green plants in our environment (p.5); coastal areas and cyclones/storms (pp.13–14); rising carbon dioxide, temperature and the disturbance of weather systems, with CO₂ increase over recent decades (pp.15–16); densely populated areas (p.18); the forests of Asia (p.19); a substantial pollution block covering land, air, noise and light pollution and their effects (pp.20–24); natural resources including solar (p.25); and a list of the ten territories worst affected by extreme weather events, referencing 2022 (p.~28) — followed by an exercise asking students to relate climate-change effects to their own cities.
• Also carries a Pakistan imports/exports listing exercise (p.~33).
• KP is therefore climate-forward at class 8 despite being the thinnest book, closer to Punjab’s Geography 8 than to Sindh’s class-8 volume, which has no climate content at all.

2. Class-by-class comparison

Class 6

At class 6 the three provinces teach three different subjects. A Sindhi child spends the year on the Indus Valley plus how government and the media work; a Punjabi child does a world-civilizations survey ending in the seventh century, with no civics at all; a KP child does a full sweep from the Indus Valley to 1526 including comparative religion.

Class 7

Class 7 is where the boards diverge most violently. Punjab’s history hour is spent substantially in Europe; KP’s is spent entirely on the Mughals; Sindh’s is spent on ancient India and then on the constitution and microeconomics.

Class 8

3. Similarities and common themes

1. 1857 is “the War of Independence” in every board that teaches it — Punjab, Sindh and KP all reject the term “Mutiny” explicitly or implicitly, and all three treat it as the origin point of the freedom struggle.
2. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan is the shared hinge figure. Punjab calls him the “Father of the Pakistan Movement” and credits him with the Two-Nation Theory; Sindh credits him with first presenting the ideology of Pakistan; KP gives him a dedicated block on his educational, social and political services. He is the single most consistently venerated modern figure across all three provinces.
3. The Pakistan Movement is a class-8 subject everywhere. No board teaches it at class 6 or 7; all three defer it to the final middle-school year, and in Punjab and KP it consumes an entire volume.
4. Partition violence is absent from every book in the corpus. Migration appears; massacres, trains, abductions and the death toll do not, in any direction, in any province.
5. Provincial history is absent from its own province’s books. PCTB has no Sikh-era or colonial Punjab and no Ranjit Singh; STBB has no 1843 annexation, no Talpurs, no Hoshu Sheedi, and does not even teach Muhammad bin Qasim; KP’s own past enters only as scattered insertions rather than as an organizing frame.
6. Aurangzeb is treated sympathetically wherever he appears (Punjab H7 p.84; KP H7), with jizya either omitted or explained as a shariah levy, and Dara Shikoh absent.
7. Din-i-Ilahi is framed as a deviation corrected by Mujaddid Alf Sani in both Punjab (p.76) and KP — an identical corrective move in two separately authored books.
8. Kashmir carries a standard cartographic treatment across boards: plebiscite disclaimers on Punjab’s maps and “INDIAN ILLEGALLY OCCUPIED JAMMU & KASHMIR” labels in Punjab Geography 8, with Kashmir and the UN resolutions handled in both Sindh’s and KP’s class-8 books.

4. Divergences

4.1 The same conqueror, three motives (Mahmud of Ghazni and Ghori)

Punjab’s History 7 gives Mahmud of Ghazni’s seventeen invasions purely political motives and omits Somnath and the temple raids entirely (p.60) — yet the very next page gives Ghori an explicitly religious motive:

“Being a Muslim, he might like to conquer the Hindus of India and spread Islam” — PCTB History 7, p.61

KP’s History 6, by contrast, itemizes Somnath (1025) and retains the idol-breaker epithet while simultaneously crediting Mahmud’s patronage of Firdausi and Al-Biruni (pp.53–55). Sindh teaches neither figure at all. The most “communal” rendering of Mahmud in the corpus is therefore in the Urdu-medium KP book, and the most sanitized in the SNC Punjab book — the opposite of what the boards’ reputations would predict.

4.2 Conquest framing versus Crusade framing (Punjab)

Punjab History 7 describes conversion in South Asia as voluntary and attraction-driven:

“Arabs did not force the locals to embrace Islam. They were rather impressed by the equality, caste-less system and social justice of Muslims.” — PCTB History 7, p.32

but describes the Crusaders’ religious motivation as pathology mixed with “greed, loot, and plunder” (p.54). Religious motive is a vice in one direction and an absence in the other; the asymmetry is internal to a single chapter sequence.

4.3 Colonial racial ethnography survives in Punjab’s Geography 6

The climatic-regions unit reproduces nineteenth-century racial description as present-tense fact:

“Wild people with small height lives in Congo. People are uncivilized. People have no interest in religion, education” — PCTB Geography 6, p.39

with Amazon peoples “known as Red Indians” (p.40) and Arctic peoples “known as Eskimos” (p.42) — the latter two even recurring as multiple-choice options (p.47). No comparable passage was found in the Sindh or KP volumes.

4.4 Hindu–Muslim relations: adversarial versus pluralist, and it flips within Sindh

Sindh’s class-8 volume is the most adversarial text in the corpus:

“Sir Syed Ahmed Khan presented the ideology of Pakistan for the first time due to the biased attitude of the Hindus.” — STBB Social Studies 8, p.52

“The Hindu racists were not only against Muslims but were against all other minorities and even Christians became victims of their atrocities.” — STBB Social Studies 8, p.52

“the Hindus had no clean heart for the Muslims” — STBB Social Studies 8, p.54

Punjab’s History 8 is adversarial in the same register, if less lurid — Hindu–Muslim unity failed “due to the negative attitude of Hindus” (p.52), and the 1965 army is described as “filled with the spirit of Jihad” (p.87).

Yet Sindh’s own class-7 book, one grade earlier, is pluralist — Ashoka admired, the Gupta era a golden period, Diwali, Holi and Baisakhi listed warmly (p.79), Ottoman millets and Cyrus’s tolerance praised. And KP’s History 6 gives Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism sympathetic parallel treatment with a comparison table (pp.34–35). The sharpest divide in the corpus is not between provinces but between curricular generations inside one province.

4.5 1857: whose war was it?

“the War of Independence, (1857) was the result of strong Muslim feeling of gaining back their lost power.” — STBB Social Studies 8, p.53

“The War of Independence was fought in 1857 CE in which all communities of India participated.” — PCTB History 8, ch.1 summary (printed p.15)

Sindh makes 1857 a Muslim war for lost sovereignty; Punjab makes it an all-communities war. Sindh nonetheless supplies the sharper anti-colonial line — “The British called this war a Mutiny … But this war was the first united effort of the Indians” (p.53) — while Punjab’s book offers no economic critique of colonialism at all.

4.6 Civics exists in Sindh and nowhere else

“Pakistan has a democratic system of government. In a democracy, citizens make decisions regarding who will be their leaders and what laws will be made by their elected representatives.” — STBB Social Studies 6, p.59

Sindh’s class-6 volume also asks students to “Identify the problem of woman citizens have in participating in the political process and suggest ways to address them” (p.59), to examine “the role of media in the election process” (p.59), and to run mock school elections. Its class-7 volume frames civil society as existing to “limit and control the power of the” state (p.60). There is no equivalent anywhere in the Punjab or KP class 6–8 books — the SNC split allocates the subject hours to History and Geography and leaves citizenship unplaced.

4.7 Climate change tracks edition age, not province

“Earth’s climate is destabilizing because of the rising atmospheric absorptions of carbon dioxide” — STBB Social Studies 7, p.80

Climate change is present and current in every post-2015 book — Punjab’s whole SNC set (Geography 8 alone mentions it 47 times), Sindh’s class 7, and KP’s Geography 8 with 2022 extreme-weather material. It is absent only from Sindh’s class-8 federal reprint, which also lacks civics. The determinant is the age of the edition, not the politics of the board.

5. Notable findings

1. The most consequential fault line is vintage, not province. Sindh runs a modern competency-based 2014/15-curriculum book at classes 6 and 7 beside an early-2000s federal ideology text at class 8. A Sindhi child moves from a pluralist, constitution-and-rights curriculum to an adversarial one in a single year, and simultaneously loses civics and climate change. Any provincial characterization of “Sindh’s textbooks” is false at the grade level.
2. Punjab’s SNC split materially changes what a child learns, and the losses are specific. Splitting Social Studies into History and Geography produced strong, current, technocratic geography (GIS, climate, real trade statistics) and a coherent chronological history spine — but it eliminated citizenship education entirely, and both Punjab geography volumes examined lack any population or demography chapter, a topic both Sindh and KP teach.
3. Ideological load in Punjab sits almost entirely in History. Geography is technocratic, its ideology confined to Kashmir map labels and celebratory CPEC framing. The split therefore concentrates rather than distributes the contested material — one book carries it, and one book could be revised to change it.
4. KP’s Urdu books are less communal on pre-modern religion than Punjab’s English ones. KP History 6 gives Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism sympathetic comparative treatment; Punjab History 6 never names Hinduism as a religion at all. This inverts the common assumption about medium and board.
5. No board foregrounds its own province. Punjab’s books carry “ONE NATION, ONE CURRICULUM” and contain no Sikh-era or colonial Punjab. Sindh promises “especially Sindh” in a preface and delivers South Asia-scale geography with 26 Sindh mentions in 232 pages, and teaches neither Muhammad bin Qasim nor the 1843 annexation. KP is the partial exception — but even there provincial identity is insertion, not organization: Gandhara sites, Sher Shah Suri, Ahmad Shah Abdali, Khushal Khan Khattak and Gadoon-Amazai are threaded into otherwise national templates, and Peshawar is never profiled as a city even in the chapter that profiles Karachi, Tokyo and London.
6. Punjab is the only board teaching substantial world history at this level — 40 pp of medieval Europe at class 7 and a full World Wars chapter at class 8. KP’s class 7 has none whatsoever. A Punjabi and a KP eighth-grader finish middle school with incompatible mental maps of the twentieth century.
7. Cumulative sequencing works in KP and fails across boards. KP’s geography deliberately splits map skills and population (class 6) from systematic physical and economic geography (class 7). But the three provinces’ sequences are mutually incompatible: a child transferring provinces between classes 6 and 8 would miss either the entire colonial narrative, or all civics, or all world history.
8. Two silences are shared by all three boards: Partition violence, and any economic critique of colonialism. Neither the drain of wealth, famines, nor deindustrialization appears — and nor does the railways-and-modernization counter-narrative.
9. Both KP class-8 files are complete, not truncated, despite being only 59 and 49 pages; each terminates on a KPTBB colophon with a print code. KP’s class-8 books are genuinely about half the length of Punjab’s equivalents, which is itself a finding about instructional time.

6. Caveats

• KP material is theme-grade only. All six KP books are Urdu tesseract OCR of variable quality. Structure, chapter titles, proper nouns and topics are recoverable; connected prose frequently is not. No KP text is quoted anywhere in this report, and KP framing claims are paraphrases of recoverable content, not renderings of the books’ actual sentences. Statements about what KP books do not contain are weaker than the equivalent statements about Punjab and Sindh, since absence may be OCR failure.
• Every verbatim quotation in this report was re-grepped against its source file before inclusion. Where a candidate quote failed exact matching it was either corrected to the source wording or dropped; several claims that could not be verified verbatim (including a “first province” education claim in Sindh 7 and a “white race” phrasing in Punjab History 6) were removed or softened accordingly. Punjab History 6’s p.60 race discussion is reported as the source renders it, including the OCR artifact “superiorrace”.
• Page numbers are PDF page markers, not printed folios, except for PCTB History 8 (native text without markers), which is cited by printed folio. Expect a few pages of offset from the printed book.
• OCR damage is uneven. Punjab Geography 7 lost the printed chapter titles of Chapters 2 and 4 to watermark interference; Sindh’s class-8 contents table lost the Chapter 7 title, recovered from body content. Punjab watermark fragments and KP perfect24u.com watermark and mirror-ad pages were disregarded throughout.
• Chapter page-extents are approximate where derived from tables of contents whose page-number column was partly lost to OCR (particularly Sindh 6 and 7, whose TOC numerals are heavily damaged).
• Coverage percentages (e.g. “roughly 40 pp Europe”) are page-count estimates from chapter extents, not word counts.
• This analysis covers classes 6–8 only. The 9–10 Pakistan Studies sequence is analyzed separately in track pakistan studies; conclusions here about what a board “never teaches” are bounded by that grade range — some absent topics reappear at class 9.

Balochistan (BTBB) — the split model, and the corpus’s most self-critical history book

Added 23 Aug 2026. All National Curriculum 2022-23 pilot editions.

Balochistan follows the History + Geography split, like Punjab and KP, and unlike Sindh’s single integrated Social Studies volume. It is the only board that publishes both media at every class in this family, which makes it the one place in the corpus where an English-medium and an Urdu-medium pupil can be compared on identical course content.

Geography is effectively secular at every class in both media — 0.1 to 0.2 religious tokens per thousand words. History is where the religious framing lives, and it rises from class 6 to 8. The subject split is doing real work: a Balochistan pupil’s geography is not a vehicle for anything.

History 8 — the most internally critical book in the current corpus

The English-medium History 8 is quotable, and it is the most surprising book this project has read.

It records joint action rather than communal separation: “Muslims and Hindus had jointly participated in the War of Independence of 1857” (PAGE 6). It rejects collective blame: “both Hindus and Muslims had participated in the war and blaming Muslims alone was unjust” (PAGE 8). It records pluralist institution-building — Aligarh “was not just for Muslim students but was open to students of other religions, including Hindus, Parsis, and Christians” (PAGE 9).

And it assigns fault inward twice, which almost nothing else in this corpus does:

“To some extent, Muslims themselves were responsible for this decline, as they could not adjust to changing times” (PAGE 6)

“Simple-minded Muslims were deeply influenced by this fatwa and sold their properties at low prices” — on the Hijrat movement (PAGE 54)

That is A4 = 2, the lowest narrative-closure score assigned to any book in the study.

Where hostility appears it is attributed to named actors, not to a bloc: “some Hindu leaders in Banaras”, “this hostile attitude of the Hindu leaders towards Urdu” (PAGE 11). A6 = 3 — historical adversary, not essentialised difference — despite the book carrying the highest out-group token density in the Balochistan set at 15.7 per thousand words. Volume is not hostility, and this book is the clearest demonstration of that in the corpus.

The counterweight, in the same board, one year later. Pakistan Studies 9 closes the narrative again: the Hindu–Muslim divide “involve[s] the confrontation of two distinct social structures” (PAGE 8), and A6 rises to 4. A Balochistan pupil moving from class 8 to class 9 meets a narrowing, not a widening — the reverse of the progression this track finds in Punjab and KP.

What the assessment does to all of it

History 8 sets 32 evaluation prompts and zero open-opinion prompts, and runs the justify-that template on contested propositions — including “Justify that the Treaty of Sevres is based on fair justice” (PAGE 32), which the book’s own narrative contradicts. The pupil meets an unusually honest account of the past and is never once asked what they make of it.