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Rote learning does not just fail to teach thinking. It actively trains children out of the habit of thinking.
A teacher once asked me about a training session I gave on problem solving and mathematical thinking. His response stopped me completely. He said: will this improve my students’ exam scores? I said no, not directly. He said: then I cannot do it. Because that is what I am judged on.
That exchange happened at a teachers’ training session attended by educators from across Punjab. It reveals, more clearly than any report or study, why rote learning vs critical thinking remains an unresolved tension in our education system. A related question worth asking: your child got first position — but what did that actually measure?
In O and A Level examinations, there is no prescribed textbook. Questions can come from anywhere within the curriculum. In Pakistan’s mainstream examination system, questions come from within a specific textbook. The entire preparation process becomes about coverage of that textbook.
He was direct: these academies should not be allowed to operate. An institution whose entire purpose is to drill children through a fixed text so they can reproduce it under exam conditions is not an educational institution. It is a reproduction machine.
Change one thing. Tell students the exam questions will not come from the textbook. Everything else would have to change to survive.
The teachers coming into classrooms today were trained by the same system. They were never taught how to develop thinking. So they cannot teach what they were never given. For an RSA algorithm demonstration, it took him three days to find the right numbers that would make the algorithm work cleanly on a blackboard in fifteen minutes. Three days for fifteen minutes of teaching. That is what genuine teaching requires.
He described a student from the 1993 batch at FAST who, when submitting code for testing, would challenge the examiner to find the bug. Confident enough in his own work to invite scrutiny. That quality is what separates people who grow from people who stay average.
You cannot develop self-respect through memorisation. Self-respect in learning comes from building something yourself and standing behind it honestly.
AI is a probabilistic model. It does not always give the correct answer. In his own recent experience, AI told him a group of fourteen people was actually fifteen, and insisted on this repeatedly until he forced it to show a running total. The people who will use AI effectively are those who understand what they are working with well enough to catch its errors.
AI does not make thinking less necessary. It makes thinking the only thing that cannot be replaced. For a deeper look at how conditioning shapes what children believe they are capable of, read: It Is Not the Curriculum. It Is the Conditioning.
His answer pointed to school, not university. By the time a student reaches higher education, the habits are formed. The window is earlier. The middle years of childhood, when habits of thinking are forming, when curiosity is either encouraged or trained out, are when the real work needs to happen.
The challenge for parents is not finding a school that teaches more content. Parents who are actively looking for an alternative will find our guide to online school in Pakistan a useful starting point. It is finding an environment where children learn how to think with what they know. Where mistakes are treated as information. Where questions are encouraged. Where a child can own their work and stand behind it.
