The primary purpose of education is to enable both students and teachers to engage in meaningful discussion and deliberation on the social dimensions of human life. This includes promoting pluralism, social harmony, collective peace, tolerance, and acceptance of diversity for all.

However, Pakistan’s education crisis is often narrated through statistics—millions out of school, low literacy rates, and underfunded institutions. While these indicators are important, they obscure a more fundamental problem: the absence of key intellectual and social elements that constitute meaningful education has not been discussed and explored in the recent past.

At the heart of this deficiency lies a culture of rote learning and reproduction of facts and figures rather than reflective discourse in classrooms from primary to tertiary level education. The system rewards memorisation over inquiry, producing students who can reproduce information but rarely interrogate, research, and relate it with reference to ground........

© The Friday Times