This whole project rests on a word — education — so we had better be honest about what that word can and cannot do. Because there is a comfortable belief, popular among the very people most likely to be reading this, that if only Pakistanis were more educated, the country would fix itself. More schools, more degrees, more literacy, and democracy would follow. It is a reassuring idea. It is also, in the plainest terms, false.
The uncomfortable evidence is all around us, and it is worth stating without flinching.
The educated cheer for coups too
Some of the loudest applause for military takeovers in Pakistan's history has come not from the uneducated poor, but from the drawing rooms of the educated urban middle class — lawyers, doctors, engineers, professors, business graduates. The most credentialed profession of all left the clearest record: the Supreme Court legalised Ayub Khan's 1958 martial law in State v. Dosso, Zia-ul-Haq's 1977 takeover in Begum Nusrat Bhutto v. Chief of Army Staff, and Pervez Musharraf's 1999 coup in Zafar Ali Shah v. Pervez Musharraf. Again and again, when the army has stepped in to "clean up" the "corrupt politicians," it is the credentialed classes who have welcomed it most eagerly, rationalized it most fluently, and defended it most confidently. Nor is this only a Pakistani story: in "From Education to Democracy?", published in the American Economic Review in 2005, the economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James Robinson and Pierre Yared found that the familiar correlation between education and democracy disappears once you follow countries over time rather than compare them with one another.
So whatever education does, it does not reliably produce democratic citizens. A person can hold a doctorate and still, in a crisis, look upward for the strong hand. Worse, a well-educated person is often simply better at it — more articulate in justifying the coup, more sophisticated in explaining why this particular seizure of power was regrettably necessary, more persuasive in defending the strongman. A sharp mind pointed in the wrong direction does not become harmless. It becomes a more effective servant of the very thing it should resist.
Facts, credentials, a career. It can make you more skilled — including at defending a strongman.
Judgment, ownership, the refusal to be herded. It makes you harder to rule badly.
Why credentials don't touch the disposition
The reason is not mysterious once you see it. Most of what we call education is designed to transfer information and confer credentials — to help you pass an exam, qualify for a profession, and climb. That is a real and valuable thing, and this essay is not against it. But information and credentials sit in a completely different part of a person than the disposition we have been describing across these essays. You can memorize the entire constitution and still wait for a savior. You can know exactly how a bill becomes law and still cheer when the army throws out the lawmakers. Knowing how the machine works is simply not the same as having the character to refuse to be a passenger in it.
You can know everything about how a country is governed and still be perfectly content to be ruled.
So what kind of education do we mean?
If credential-education is not the answer, what is? Not the transfer of information, but formation — the shaping of how a person thinks, judges, and acts. It has three parts, and none of them is a set of facts to memorize.
How to think: to evaluate a claim instead of following the person who makes it; to recognize propaganda; to hold a judgment even when your tribe wants you to abandon it. How to act: to take ownership, to lead from where you stand, to organize with others rather than wait. And the norms that hold a free country together: above all, the discipline of never inviting the umpire — of refusing to welcome an unconstitutional rescue, even when it would remove an enemy you despise. This is civic and leadership formation, and it is a different craft from schooling. It is the actual work of turning a subject into a citizen.
This is precisely why what we are building calls itself a leadership institute and not an encyclopedia of governance. A website full of facts about how Pakistan is run would change nothing, because the problem was never a shortage of facts. A person who has been formed — who thinks independently, owns outcomes, and refuses to be herded — will find the facts they need. A person who has only been informed will use the facts to argue, brilliantly, for their own continued subjecthood.
The honest part
This is not a case against knowledge
Read carelessly, this essay could sound anti-education or anti-expert — as if knowledge were the problem and ignorance a kind of virtue. That would be a catastrophic misreading, and it leads straight to a different trap. The strongman's other favorite tool, alongside the worshipful crowd, is exactly this contempt for knowledge and expertise — the populist sneer that "ordinary common sense" beats the educated fools. Anti-intellectualism is not the cure for savior-politics; it is one of its most reliable engines.
The point is not that credentials and knowledge are bad. They are necessary — but they are not sufficient. Expertise matters enormously; a country needs people who deeply know medicine, law, economics, engineering. Formation without knowledge is just confident ignorance, which is its own disaster. What we are saying is narrower and more precise: a degree is necessary for a career and useful for a citizen, but it was never designed to make anyone free. That is a different kind of work — and it is the work we do here.
So by all means, get educated — deeply, rigorously, in whatever field is yours. Knowledge is not the enemy. But do not mistake the diploma for liberation, and do not wait for a more literate Pakistan to save the country, because a more literate Pakistan, on its own, will produce more articulate apologists for the next strongman. The education that sets a people free is a different education. It does not fill you with facts. It changes how you stand.