I know Islamabad's latitude; I don't know my own address

Pakistan's schooling model is producing confident fools. Yes! You heard that right. Every year, millions of Pakistani children walk into classrooms and spend twelve years of their lives being taught how to do almost everything except live. Declared successful, they smile brightly for the cameras, host lavish feasts to celebrate, and pose proudly in matching graduation gowns. And then…they go home and cannot change a light bulb, cannot cook a meal, cannot clean a floor - because to them, a broom feels like a betrayal of their degrees. Who invented this absurdity? And more to the point: why are we still marching our children into it?

To understand the scale of this absurdity, let's stop polishing this national delusion about what our curriculum actually demands of students. It demands that a child spend an entire week before every new school year carefully wrapping textbooks in brown paper and plastic sheets, cutting and pasting magazine photographs onto chart paper, and then calling it a "project". It demands that students draw the water cycle. Then draw it again in class four. Then again, in class five. The same clouds. The same arrows. The same labeled "evaporation" and "condensation" that they traced the year before, because nobody ever asked whether they understood it, only whether they could reproduce it neatly enough.

Beyond that, it demands that children memorise the exact height of every mountain in Pakistan, down to the meter, as if one day they will be standing at the foot of Nanga Parbat and a stranger will ask them to confirm the number. It also demands they memorise the longitude and latitude of Islamabad, as if the capital city will drift into the Arabian Sea should they forget it by Thursday. And then there is the Urdu application: it demands that students write using phrases so ancient and theatrical that they border on a formality which has forgotten how to be useful. Janab Aali, ba-kamaal adab arz hai ke i.e. Your Esteemed Excellency, with utmost reverence, I beg to submit. Remember: these are children applying for sick leave, not ambassadors petitioning a royal court.

And now the real comedy begins here. It demands that a child memorise the exact dates of battles fought centuries ago, word for word, comma for comma, as if the ghost of Muhammad bin Qasim will rise from his grave and personally fail the student who confuses 712 AD with 713 AD. The dates are memorised. The wars are won. The exam is passed. And not a single child heads home with any analytical grasp of what objectively happened. Quite a few demands, aren't there?

And perhaps the most absurd of all, it spends enormous classroom time drilling students on how to draw margins with pencils, underline headings with rulers, and present notebooks to please the teacher's eye. The notebook is submitted. The presentation is graded. The thinking is never checked because the thinking was never the point.

Is this education, or institutionalised wasting of time?

The tragedy is not just that these practices waste time. No, the real tragedy is what they are quietly teaching, and that lesson is the "loss of common sense". Yup! They are teaching children that the final insights live in the curriculum and nowhere else. And that physical work is something you outsource, tolerate, or inherit from a lower station in life.

For here is the danger: this ideology does not stay in the classroom. It walks out with the child, grows with them, and becomes the breeding ground for some of the most toxic behaviour in Pakistani society.