You want to reason out how a state falls? Don’t look at its politicians. Look at its teacher-recruitment ads. The collapse is advertised there first.
We have normalised a system where anyone can walk into a classroom and call themselves a teacher. Yes! In Pakistan, the title “teacher” is handed out to virtually anyone who stands in front of a whiteboard. There is no strict licensing requirement, no proper screening, and no psychological evaluation. Imagine a hospital where anyone off the street could perform surgery. That is the exact recklessness with which Pakistan staffs its classrooms, shaping young minds with zero training.
This careless system is one of the biggest reasons our education keeps collapsing. It doesn’t just produce poor graduates; it produces poor parents, poor citizens and poor leaders. It amplifies dysfunction across every domain of life for generations. Here, “passionate about shaping young minds” is often code for “desperate for a paycheck”. You are not “giving someone a chance” by letting them teach. You are gambling with children’s lives. You are using human futures as casino chips for adult rehabilitation. It is immoral. We inspect restaurants for hygiene but not classrooms for intellectual poison. A mediocre meal causes a stomachache. A mediocre education causes a crippled life and a feeble nation.
When an educational establishment brings on people with poor communication skills, rigid personal biases, outdated thinking and no knowledge of child psychology, the outcome becomes painfully predictable: students lose confidence and fears disagreeing, self-belief is terminated with extreme prejudice, toxic mentorship is promoted as discipline, faculty transform into harsh critics, and classroom environment becomes stressed, oppressive and unhappy.
Every serious profession demands licensing – doctors, engineers, lawyers, even electricians. Yet teaching, the profession that deals with children for most of their waking hours, welcomes the aimless, the unqualified and the disillusioned with open arms.
A proper teaching licence system would instantly remove half the unfit individuals who entered the field only because they needed a job, not because they were qualified for the responsibility. A licensing system ensures: only skilled candidates enter classrooms; mandatory training in psychology and pedagogy; proper background checks; and teaching exams that test real ability.
Pakistan’s education standards would rise the moment this becomes mandatory.
Yumna Zahid Ali
Karachi
