Originally published in The Friday Times on January 23, 2026. Read the original.
After more than three decades of teaching, learning, observing, and unlearning across Pakistan, Europe, East Asia, and other parts of the Global South, I have stopped asking why Pakistani students struggle to think independently. I now ask a more disturbing question: why would they ever learn to?
From school to university, our education system is not designed to build thinking humans. It is designed to manufacture compliant survivors—students who can endure pressure, reproduce content, avoid risk, and navigate authority. Everything else is incidental.
This is not a moral judgement on students. It is a structural indictment of schooling.
Pakistani students are often blamed for their lack of critical thinking, teamwork, ethical reasoning, or communication skills. The accusation usually comes wrapped in cultural shorthand. Religion made them dogmatic. Politics made them tribal. The media made them loud and shallow. These explanations are comforting because they shift responsibility away from institutions.
But these are not causes. They are reflections.
Religion, politics, and media in Pakistan do not deform students independently of education. They expose what schooling failed to build. Where critical thinking is absent, dogma thrives. Where ethical reasoning is undeveloped, power replaces principle. Where teamwork and listening are never practised, shouting becomes communication.
The real failure begins much earlier, in classrooms that confuse discipline with silence and learning with obedience.
Pakistani schooling does not train students to ask questions. It trains them to avoid mistakes. From the first day, children learn that the safest student is the quiet one, the correct one, the invisible one. Group work is rare and meaningless. Ethical reasoning is preached, not practised. Debate is performative, not analytical. Failure is penalised, not examined.
Over time, this produces a very specific psychological profile. Students become hyper-alert to authority, allergic to ambiguity, and terrified of intellectual exposure. They may score well, even excel, but they do not trust their own judgement. They wait for permission to think.
I have taught students from the Global South in Western institutions and Western students in Southern contexts. The difference is not intelligence or effort. It is posture. Students trained in systems that value discussion, collaboration, and argument arrive assuming their ideas matter, even when they are wrong. Pakistani students arrive assuming their ideas are dangerous unless approved.
This is why teamwork fails. Our students are rarely taught how to disagree without hostility, how to divide intellectual labour, or how to build something collectively. Group assignments become exercises in domination or withdrawal. Either one student does everything, or no one takes responsibility.
Soft skills are not soft at all. They are foundational. Listening, articulating uncertainty, negotiating disagreement, recognising ethical limits—these are not taught explicitly anywhere in our schooling. We assume they will emerge naturally. They do not.
Ethics, meanwhile, is treated as a list of moral slogans rather than a discipline of reasoning. Students are told what is right, never asked why. They memorise values without practising moral judgement. When they later encounter power, whether religious, political, or institutional, they lack the internal tools to question it.
This is where media, religion, and politics enter the picture—not as origins, but as accelerants. A student trained to think critically can watch toxic media and recognise manipulation. A student trained in ethical reasoning can practise faith without surrendering inquiry. A student trained in teamwork and dialogue can engage in politics without becoming tribal. But when schooling fails to build these capacities, external forces rush in to fill the vacuum. Media supplies outrage. Religion supplies certainty. Politics supplies belonging. None of them requires thinking. All of them reward allegiance.
Across my South–South teaching experience, I have seen similar patterns in under-resourced systems. Across South–North transitions, I have seen how quickly Pakistani students can transform when placed in environments that reward questioning rather than punishment. This alone should tell us the problem is not cultural destiny. It is an educational design.
So what must change? First, critical thinking must stop being a buzzword and become a method. This means fewer topics and more depth. Fewer exams and more writing. Questions without a single correct answer. Assessment of reasoning, not recall.
Second, teamwork must be taught deliberately, not assumed. Students must learn how to collaborate, how to manage conflict, how to listen, and how to lead without dominating. These skills do not emerge spontaneously. They are trained.
Third, ethics must be integrated into everyday learning, not as moral instruction, but as moral reasoning. Case studies. Dilemmas. Consequences. Accountability. Students must practise choosing, failing, and reflecting.
Fourth, pedagogy must change. Teachers must be retrained from lecturers into facilitators of thinking. Authority must become accountable. Classrooms must tolerate discomfort. Intellectual risk must be protected.
Until this happens, no media reform will work. No political awareness campaign will succeed. No religious moderation discourse will penetrate. You cannot fix the reflection while ignoring the mirror.
Pakistan does not lack brilliant minds. It lacks an education system brave enough to let them think aloud. We have built schools that fear noise, doubt, and failure. And then we complain that our graduates cannot innovate, collaborate, or reason ethically. An education system that trains survivors will never produce free thinkers. And a society without free thinkers will keep mistaking obedience for order, and certainty for truth.
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