Shaiza Ahmed
A country’s future is written first in its classrooms. What children are taught to believe about themselves and about others — about who belongs and who does not, about whose faith is worthy of respect and whose is tolerated at best — becomes the foundation on which social peace either rests or collapses. In Pakistan, that foundation has long carried a fault line that official policy has preferred not to examine too closely. A new study has made that evasion harder to sustain.
Inclusive Education for a United and Harmonious Pakistan, a research study conducted during 2024 and 2025, has documented what minority communities, civil society organisations and honest educators have known for years: Punjab’s textbooks contain discriminatory and exclusionary content that contributes directly to faith-based marginalisation and actively restricts critical thinking among students. The study goes further, describing Pakistan’s educational structure as deeply fragmented, with public schools, private institutions, missionary schools and seminaries operating under varied curricula and sharply uneven standards. This is not a peripheral concern. It is a diagnosis of something dangerously close to the centre of national life.
The consequences of this failure are not abstract. The Jaranwala incident of August 2023 — in which a Christian neighbourhood was ransacked by a mob acting on accusations of blasphemy — stands as one of the most disturbing recent examples of what communal hatred, once cultivated, ultimately produces. Churches were burned, homes were destroyed and lives were shattered. But Jaranwala did not emerge from nowhere. Violence of that character requires preparation, and that preparation happens over years, across generations, often inside institutions that are supposed to produce citizens rather than mobs. When prejudice is normalised at the primary level, when students grow up never encountering a sympathetic portrait of another faith or a dignified representation of a minority community, the ground is prepared for exactly the kind of carnage that shocked the world. The school is not the only institution responsible, but it is among the earliest and most influential.
What makes the current moment both urgent and, cautiously, hopeful is that some movement is visible. The Punjab Education, Curriculum, Training and Assessment Authority has recently approved religious education textbooks for Christian, Hindu, Sikh, Kalash, Buddhist and Zoroastrian students. This is a meaningful step and should be acknowledged as such. For too long, minority students in Pakistan’s public schools have been placed in the deeply uncomfortable position of sitting through religious instruction that does not address their own faith, or worse, of internalising a curriculum that treats their communities as marginal to the national story. Providing dedicated religious textbooks for these communities signals that the state is at least beginning to recognise its obligation of equal treatment.
But recognition and implementation are different things, and Pakistan has a well-established habit of allowing good intentions to die in the gap between them. The approval of new textbooks is the beginning of a process, not its conclusion. Those books must be taught, and they must be taught well. That requires teachers who are themselves equipped to handle interfaith content with sensitivity, classrooms that prioritise empathy over conformity, and administrative systems that treat the inclusion of minority students as a measurable responsibility rather than a gesture of goodwill. If new textbooks are printed and then left to gather dust, or handed to teachers who lack the training to use them meaningfully, the exercise will have produced paperwork rather than progress.
The challenge in Sindh illustrates the same point from a slightly different angle. The Sindh Education and Literacy Department’s initiative to introduce religious textbooks for primary-level Hindu students in public schools is welcome in principle, but it is incomplete in scope. It excludes other minority faiths and therefore reproduces at a smaller scale the same problem it is trying to address: the state selecting which communities deserve accommodation while leaving others without. Inclusion that is selective is not inclusion. It is a tiered system with a different label.
The broader reform agenda requires confronting several things simultaneously. Mainstream curricula must be reviewed not only for what they explicitly say about minorities but for what they omit. The absence of any meaningful engagement with the intellectual and cultural contributions of Pakistan’s non-Muslim communities is itself a form of erasure. History, literature and civics taught through a single faith lens produce students who have no conceptual framework for understanding fellow citizens who do not share that faith. Celebrating figures from other religious and cultural traditions within mainstream syllabi is not a concession to minority sentiment. It is an investment in the kind of civic literacy that a pluralist society requires to hold together.
Teacher training matters as much as curriculum design. A textbook that treats religious diversity with fairness can still be delivered by a teacher whose own attitudes communicate something entirely different. Insensitive classroom environments are not merely a matter of individual character. They reflect what teacher education programmes teach, or fail to teach, about the obligations of a public educator in a diverse society.
Every child in Pakistan deserves to see themselves reflected with dignity in the education the state provides. Every child also deserves to encounter, early and consistently, the reality that their country contains many communities, many traditions and many ways of belonging to the same national life. Homes that breed prejudice cannot always be changed by law. Schools that do the same have no such excuse. The state has both the authority and the obligation to make Pakistan’s classrooms places where citizenship is taught in full, not in the edited version that has caused so much harm for so long.
