I mostly agree with you. Education probably is the closest thing Pakistan has to a real long term fix, and over time a better educated population usually does improve productivity, incomes, and social mobility. But in Pakistan’s case, the problem is not just getting kids into schools because what if what they are actually learning isn’t useful to anyone?
That is the wada catch.
Pakistan’s learning outcomes are so weak that simply spending more money or forcing one syllabus on everyone will not magically fix society. A quick google search will show that surface numbers of education are false and huge numbers of children are still struggling with basic reading and math at early grade levels and going onto be “matriculated” while unable to converse in English or read it properly or understand basic concepts.
So yes, education matters, but it needs direction. If the system just produces students who can memorize, pass exams, and repeat slogans, then you are not building a healthier society, you are just producing more certificate and rubber stamped people inside the same broken culture - this forum is ample evidence to it.
Living example of why that is harder than it sounds. Look at KP. PTI had over a decade there, declared education emergencies, increased budgets sharply, hired teachers by the tens of thousands, and made it a core part of their identity and brand. That is not nothing. The intent and the investment were real.
But the actual results tell a different story. Quoting from google: Adult literacy in KP barely moved between 2013 and 2023, staying stuck around 51 to 52 percent, while Punjab raised theirs steadily to 66 percent in the same period. Youth literacy in KP sat at around 55 percent while Punjab pushed above 70. Nearly 37 percent of KP school age children were still not enrolled by 2023.
So KP under PTI spent more, talked more, and governed longer in that one province than anywhere else, and still fell behind. Why? Because the same patterns showed up inside the reform itself. Budget increases went mostly to salaries rather than learning outcomes, teacher hiring got politicized despite the merit narrative, temporary teachers stayed in limbo for years, schools were announced that lacked basic infrastructure, and monitoring stayed internal rather than genuinely independent. The intent was real. The implementation fell back into the same old habits.
Now, can you blame Imran Khan for this? Partly yes. He had the platform, the mandate, and the brand loyalty in KP that no other leader had. If any leader could have forced sustained institutional follow through in Pakistan’s recent history, it should have been him in that province. That he could not, or did not, is a legitimate failure of leadership. But here is where it also becomes about PTI supporters themselves. The same base that wanted accountability from others kept giving KP a pass. Every failure got explained away as establishment interference, federal underfunding, or the security situation in merged districts. Valid excuses partly, but also a pattern of not holding your own side to the same standard you demand from opponents.
But let’s be clear, this is not an argument that the other parties are better or that supporting PTI was wrong. PPP has run Sindh for nearly two decades and its literacy outcomes are not dramatically better. Punjab under the Sharifs built motorways and orange trains while the same learning poverty persisted underneath the optics. Every party, every government, every leader has failed this specific test in their own way.
Which brings it all back to the point I made earlier….The real issue is not which party you support. It is that Pakistanis across the board, supporters of every party, keep evaluating governments on the wrong things. On slogans, on personality, on symbolic projects, on who your opponent is rather than what you yourself are building. Until the social habit of demanding measurable, sustained, unglamorous institutional outcomes changes, education reform will keep getting announced, budgeted, celebrated, and then quietly abandoned when the political cycle moves on.
And that is why the only realistic path at this point probably runs through non state intervention. Independent civil society monitoring, private and NGO programs, community accountability structures, and international technical partnerships that are insulated from political cycles rather than dependent on whichever party is in Islamabad or Peshawar this year.
Not because the state should be let off the hook, but because waiting for the state to fix itself from within, given everything this thread has been about, is itself a form of the same short-term magical thinking that keeps Pakistan stuck in the loop.