Thought Behind Things · Jun 18, 2021 · 59:04
Does school fuel insecurities?
Sheena Sohail, Principal of HITEC School and College for Girls in Taxila, sits down with Muzamil to talk about what schools are actually doing to children — and what they're failing to do.
with Sheena Sohail
9 min read
From a family of educators to the principal’s chair
The episode opens with Sheena Sohail tracing a path that was, in some ways, already drawn for her. Her father retired as principal of Murray College. Her mother was principal of an FGE school. Education was the air she grew up breathing. But Sheena is careful to distinguish inheritance from intention. The journey she embarked upon, she says, was hers to fulfil — not simply a continuation of what came before.
She completed her schooling through FG institutions, studied at Government College and Canada College, and took a master’s in English literature. Straight out of that, she began teaching — first briefly at a college on Kashmiri Road, then at Lawrence College in Murree, where she would spend eleven years. “My heart still stays there,” she says. “It beats with the name.” She was living in Murree at the time, her husband commuting from Rawalpindi on weekends. She describes him, without hesitation, as “the wind beneath my wings.”
The move from teacher to administrator was not a sudden leap. It happened along the journey. By 2009, she was vice principal. When Muzamil asks where she saw herself in five years at that point, she is direct: “I said yes, I’m going to be the principal in five years time.” But she is equally direct about what that ambition was not. It was not about an air-conditioned office or giving orders. “There was a vision which I wanted. There were things that I wanted to contribute. There were things that I wanted to accomplish. There were things that I wanted to do with the power that comes with the seat.”
When education becomes a transaction
Muzamil raises something that has been sitting with him — the sense that education has become a business commodity, and that many teachers, despite deserving enormous respect, did not genuinely care about students as human beings. Sheena does not push back. She agrees, and she explains why it has become harder.
In an earlier era, she argues, a teacher had a fairly contained picture of a child. The variables were manageable. Now, a student is shaped by phone, by social media, by friendships that extend far beyond the school gate. The structured environment that once gave teachers a clear window into a child’s world no longer exists in the same way. “Because all right, you know, the sort of safe space, structured environment — there is a lot of other variables that are now defining a child’s personality.”
This is not an excuse for disengagement. It is, in her reading, a reason why teachers need to be more aware, more sensitive, and better trained — not less. The children in schools today, she says, are going to mould the future. That is not a platitude. It is a responsibility. “We the teachers are responsible. Hundred percent.”
The outlier problem: how schools punish the wrong students
Later in the discussion, Muzamil brings up something he has been thinking about for a long time — the pattern of troubled kids in school who, years later, turn out to have been going through extraordinarily difficult circumstances at home. The teachers hated them. The children became rebellious. The rebellion confirmed the teachers’ view. A cycle locked in.
He connects this to a recent guest on the podcast — an eighteen-year-old who kept insisting he was not interested in studies. Muzamil did not believe it. The young man had built a YouTube channel, was running a business, had taught himself skills through online videos. “I asked him on the podcast: how did you learn all of this? He said, I went on YouTube and I saw videos and I learned. And I was like — okay, so was that not education for you?”
The argument Muzamil is making, and which Sheena affirms, is that the system has defined what a good student looks like and then optimised entirely for that image. Anyone who falls outside it is not nurtured differently — they are pushed away. “More often than not,” Muzamil says, “you’ll find these kids to be the most critically thinking kids as well. Anyone who’s an outlier, we banish them.”
Sheena adds the teacher’s side of this. Students are carrying enormous baggage from home. A teacher who lacks awareness and sensitivity will not see the baggage — they will only see the behaviour. That gap, between what a child is carrying and what a teacher perceives, is where a great deal of damage is done.
Career counselling and the self that students never find
The conversation turns to career counselling — or the lack of it. Muzamil describes the calls he gets from young people asking whether a particular field has “scope.” He finds the question itself revealing. “Scope is what you make it out to be. You could be a prodigious guitarist and you could be a billionaire for all I care.” The real problem, he suggests, is that these students do not know themselves well enough to even begin answering the question.
Sheena confirms that career counselling exists in her school, but in a limited form. She does not claim it is sufficient. The honest admission is that high schoolers are often simply lost — and the system sends them into the world without having helped them find themselves first.
Muzamil raises the case of a woman who spent five years telling her parents she did not want to be a doctor. They pushed her through anyway. She wanted to be a makeup artist, to work in art. He also cites the statistic — mentioned in the conversation — that 85,000 women doctors in Pakistan are not working, having effectively vacated seats that could have gone to people who wanted to be there. The waste is not just personal. It runs through the entire system.
Women’s potential, and the fathers who block it
Two stories Muzamil tells in this episode are worth sitting with. The first is a young woman who graduated with a 3.9 GPA, applied to top companies including IBM and Affinity — a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange — got in everywhere, and then did not go. Her father did not believe she could work. “It broke my heart,” Muzamil says. He told her to apply for a master’s and leave. “You deserve better than this.”
The second is a candidate he interviewed for a job — the smartest person he had spoken to in that hiring round. He offered her the position on the spot. She could not start on Monday. Days passed. Eventually, through a mutual contact, he learned what was going on at home. She never told him directly. “Absolute waste of human potential and human intellect.”
Sheena’s response is not to treat these as isolated cases. She connects them to the broader question of how boys are raised — because the fathers in these stories were once boys in schools. “We keep on talking about this — that we need to raise our boys right. So when they are going to be mothers and when they have sons and they are raising them right…” The logic is generational. The school’s job is not just to educate the child in front of it. It is to interrupt a cycle.
The teacher who is not fed
One of the sharpest lines in the conversation comes from Sheena, referencing something she believes every school leader should read: “If you don’t feed the teachers, they eat the students.”
It is a striking formulation. Teachers who are not trained, not supported, not developed — they do not simply underperform. They take it out on the people below them. The students absorb what the institution fails to give the teacher. This is why, Sheena argues, teacher training is not a nice-to-have. It is the mechanism by which everything else either works or fails. Having the right person in the right place, and then continuously investing in that person, is the only way the chain holds.
Muzamil asks whether Pakistan has enough teacher training infrastructure. The honest answer is no. But Sheena’s point is that even within a school, the culture of day-to-day interaction, of ongoing engagement with teachers, matters enormously. It does not all have to come from formal programmes. It has to come from leadership that takes it seriously.
Parenting, guilt, and what children absorb
By the end of the conversation, the discussion has moved into territory that is clearly personal for Muzamil. He and his wife recently had a child. She is navigating the guilt of returning to work — present at the office and feeling like she should be home, present at home and feeling like she should be working. He asks Sheena how she reconciled that.
Her answer is honest. She says there are moments when she looks back and thinks she should have done something differently with her own child. But she also says: “We need to be kind to ourselves.” The guilt is natural. The balance is real work. Neither of those things cancels the other out.
Muzamil then raises something he thinks is underexamined — the working father. Men in Pakistan come home after the child is already asleep. That absence is rarely discussed with the same weight as a mother’s. He does not resolve it. He just names it.
He also describes an observation from a trip to Turkey before his child was born — the way children there were out in public, on strollers, at the beach, without the constant anxiety that surrounds young children in Pakistan. And the contrast on the flight back: a grandmother, two children, a seven-year-old hitting a four-year-old, and no intervention. The point is not to shame anyone. It is to say that what children see modelled is what they carry forward. “Whatever we are feeding our children, they’re going to…”
Sheena finishes the thought in spirit, if not in words. The school cannot fix what the home breaks. But the home cannot fix what the school breaks either. They are the same system.
Pakistan in 2050
Muzamil closes, as he does with every guest, by asking how they see Pakistan in 2050. Sheena is measured. She sees awareness growing — among schools, among leaders — about what the real responsibilities are. She is not naively optimistic, but she is not without hope. “We will always go towards better.”
When pressed on what could hamper that trajectory, she is specific: women’s empowerment, and the need to identify Pakistan’s values clearly before trying to build structures around them. Not vague aspiration — identification first, then architecture.
It is a fitting note to end on. The whole conversation has been about the gap between what institutions say they are doing and what they are actually doing to the people inside them. Closing that gap, Sheena suggests, starts with honesty about what you believe and what you are willing to build.
Full transcript
[Music] [Applause] [Music] and i did agree with a lot of what he said and so i thought you know is conversation may add currently we should get someone from uh someone who has that experience of teaching of managing a school of uh you know this particular industry and for that we have today uh sheena she's a principal at school and college for girls at high tech texila ma'am thank you so much for coming in thank you for having me uh what was your sort of journey okay okay musamel i come from an uh family of education is my father was a professor uh he retired as uh principal murray college my mother was a principal f.g.e school in salgo so joe education right but am who i am the journey that i am i embarked upon a tea or uh you know fulfilling it fulfilling every hundred percent um so yes i did my uh metric from f g usa convention mary and then f g because my mother was the principal there so um then a government called it say many salgo and then then canada college and masters in english literature right so i can see a lot of convent and canadian youth it's very vibrant evident i think yes so and then uh straight out of uh grenade or aftermath english english content and so straight out of canada you started teaching uh then i got married and then yes i started teaching i joined um uh peleto today moti jobs your contract pay um kashmiri road uh uh college right i i just taught there for about a few months usually i joined lawrence college that's right that's right and that has been a wonderful experience my heart still stays there it beats with the name the lawrence coalition since enriching experience i was yes i was living in murray at the time wow that must have been so much fun it was it was i mean that must have been a life time you know away from your husband yes yes he used to come over the weekends he was here in bindi and so i would say my husband has always been the wind beneath my wings i think there's a lot to learn um you know in in that particular uh aspect as well but we're going to focus on the education part yes um you know you spent 11 years at lawrence college teaching english teaching english and then eventually moved to then in 2006 baby of offices sitting studying together with children of our sanitary staff also treatment i think that's really missing in pakistani systems because [Music] um from a teacher to an administrator where was that sort of evolution how did that happen it happened along the way it happens [Music] here after right journey a journey along the journey i was just thinking today in 2009 i was a teacher then right where do you see yourself in um i was the vice principal actually teacher in five years time so i thought and i said yes i'm going to be the principal in five years time or using me i was the principal of an institution okay i wanted a seat or i wanted to be sitting in an ac room or giving orders there was a vision which i wanted there were things that i wanted to contribute there were things that i wanted to accomplish there were things that i wanted to do with the power that comes with the with the seat with the seat right and i think that sort of passion is required or maybe workplace cultures who are actually have a vision of pursuing that vision or jupiter better he knows he knows he knows who's the one with the vision vision leaders um i feel like education has become sort of like a like a business commodity that's right um and i feel like if i was to look back yes i mean huge respect to a lot of teachers who are the reason why i am who i am today that's right um but i didn't find a lot of people who genuinely cared about the students as human beings and functional members of the society [Applause] [Music] you know these are people these are human beings and whatever i inculcate into them today will be will impact a lot of people in the future the future exactly so why do you think that sort of discrepancy exists uh in in today's uh education system um perfect right [Music] the exchange of information uh a big product majors usually what a standard you know you got like a curriculum course book um you had a fairly good understanding of how people will be because you know symbols solution for that particular kid but now it's becoming increasingly difficult to identify because because pacheco has phone via the um you know he's he's watching facebook he's communicating with his friends beyond school as well so because all right you know the the sort of safe space uh structured environment there is a lot of other variables um that are now defining a child's personality and you know ab johanna we were growing when we were growing up we grew up in a very very safe environment challenges these children are going to uh mold the future right so uh when i was in lawrence college even at that time in the staff room we we used to say yes they would be rulers and that is what has happened today even teachers i got a message from a student lawrence college student sitting in the u.s eventually they're going to a society where everybody is going to be attacking them and that's right you know if you don't teach your children the society will yeah and that is the hard way to learn yeah so it's better to teach them the easy way and then the children in our schools we have to teach them to be good human beings in the society to be responsible citizens we are responsible we the teachers are responsible hundred percent is that uh is there a private institute or is that like a government uh you know um uh can you identify the difference between federal board and punjab in your experience federal board is more progressive okay federal board what a cha ray or uh federal board is more reliable also like uh high techie we work very hard our teachers are extremely good extremely hard working so many positions and then a junior school class 5k but boys going to the boys college girls into girls college and then there's a cambridge stream also there's the cameras stream you're particularly doing a girls college and this is something that's very close to my heart particularly um you know my wife uh she was one of the first people who came on social media um women in ours in our country in our society have played an incredible role um you know in in almost everything i mean from padma jinnah to uh all sorts of women leaders even benazir bhutto as the first woman prime minister of this country and and unfortunately in the past couple of decades or probably past three decades [Music] and so what we've seen is that we've instead of progressing as a society we've sort of taken a u-turn uh unfortunately particularly education uh the two things i saw i or two incidents i heard recently that i'd like to share uh generally you know i i i put up a post on my instagram every now and then and i give random mentorship to two young kids so i got a call from this girl this one time and she said listen like i um you know i i want to do freelancing so what how do i go about it and i was like so freelancing is generally low value work so it's basically like if you can't do anything else you're sitting at home just do freelancing and you'll make a good two three hundred dollars but if you if you're like a technically sound a smart person i mean you could target much much more right so melissa chachamanika she's probably like a very average student um not really doing anything with her life so she's been starting to do freelance a few questions and graduate consequences it's a very futuristic it's like the data is the new oil that's what it is right and and i'm thinking here okay why is she talking about content writing positions and so i i kept on asking a question i was like listen so you just graduated have you tried to apply in in companies instead of freelancing you know my thought was maybe she was thinking into my freelancer and and so she was like yes i did um like yeah she was like you know data ibm these are the top companies i mean affinity is listed on the new york stock exchange and and i was like okay so did you get in she was like i got in everywhere and i'm really confused at this point i'm like if you got into the top i mean and she was like i graduated with like a 3.9 or something like a top you know gold medalist i applied to these positions i left these positions i got there i was like why aren't you pursuing that and she was like oh you know my father doesn't believe that i can work and honestly i can't tell you it broke my heart unfortunately i don't know i'm sorry but you should you should apply for your masters and you should leave because this is i mean you deserve better than this you went there you went to a good university you studied in a good university you got the grades that you you had the potential of you applied at the right jobs you got in and just because your father is at a position where he's surrounded by men who disrespect women day in day out that he believes that my daughter will be go to a place it's very anecdotal right that's right a few months ago and then last week i was hiring people and this one girl very smart probably the smartest candidate i i had a i had the pleasure of having an interview with and so i had that interview and i offered her a job there and there um and and she was from lumb she was you know very very progressive institute and you know i offered her a job and i was like you know starting you're starting from monday and she couldn't come in on monday and and she said you know listen i just have some problems going on and i'll let you know get classy and three four five days pass and i again i don't know what the problems are so i'm like you know listen if you don't want to join let me know and then i'll call someone and she then she was like you know listen i i really want to join just give me another day um give me till monday it's still what friday today so i still have to wait until yeah i i think she didn't tell me because one of her friends is working here and she actually told me you know this is what's going on and i was like yeah why what is this this absolute waste of human potential in human intellect so i'd like to ask you because you're like interacting with a lot of these girls school we keep on talking about this that we need to raise our boys right so when they are going to be mothers and why the reason why we need to raise them right because the challenges that they are facing today if they have sons when they have sons and they are treating them they are raising them right problems [Music] foreign [Music] i genuinely believe one step at a time yes one step makes um you know you're dealing with middle school kids primarily uh i'm dealing with middle school and high school and high school um there's a there's a new thing called single national curriculum do you have an understanding of as a as a woman leader as someone who's who who's working um and this is something you can marry this is a personal thing for me um you know you had kids um you know we recently had a kid and my wife has this sort of going in this sort of huge dilemma you know at one day she's coming to the office and she's like okay listen i need to get i need to start working and i need to get back into it's been three months okay you know get back into the system and the minute she's here and she's just hugely guilty you know as a mother what am i doing um how did you reconcile with that um it's a very very huge responsibility it's a huge job but um you have to strike a balance right and lots of time yeah it's very very natural very normal to feel guilty a baby when i look back sometimes i say okay okay i should not have done this i should have uh raised my child in this aspect but uh told us that we need to be kind to ourselves as well we need to be kind to ourselves also makes a lot of sense and i think uh one of the things that i i also i'm recently thinking about okay we do talk a lot about working mothers we don't talk a lot about working fathers um you know as as as a father i feel like i'm going back back home and he's already asleep um and majority of the men in pakistan you know listening is very important right when you are raising children generally society problems when i call people in i don't ask them yet skill but i feel like skills could be acquired i generally ask people stuff like you know how do you i mean name three things that you that motivates you about pakistan you know what are your political opinions i really did sort of dive into that and i i talk about you know what what do you really want to do in life statements later okay i am really great because i can do this working i uh in terms of the uh education industry and we talk a lot about how pakistan may be not including critical thinking curriculum [Music] we took out so many things there was role play there were so many things and then do we have any ugly ducklings around us today who are not included right so have you ever felt like an ugly duckling because i did feel like an ugly duckling when i was growing up right because of my complexion i was not included in lots of things right so a baby um coming back to the point curriculum important here but the way you teach it that is extremely important extremely important i think teachers teachers keep training positions having the right person at the right place is very important do you think we have ample amounts of teacher training um you know in pakistan uh without any teacher training sometimes right and you um engage your teacher in lots of trainings day-to-day interaction right so it's very important to have that sort of culture in our schools make sense to cling up an example then we were talking about this off camera as well um okay a lot of times in pakistan what we do and i know again what's that look what kind of experience and there is a there's a definitive [Music] school throughout my schooling journey and i saw all the troubled kids and and you know because of information sharing facebook and all of that you start to realize a lot of them were going through very very tough times that's right parents society and i saw you know these and i i i started to think i experienced because they the teachers used to hate them the children became rebellious because they became rebellious the students were like ikaji pakal so they used to start being like aggressive towards them that's right um and so i had a kid recently on on the podcast and he was talking about and i could tell from the vibe and he kept on saying you know i'm not interested in studies and i'm not interested in studies shockingly oh man i'm scared about bullying again you're constantly saying this then i don't believe it i don't believe a human being is inherently anti-study or anti-education what i do believe is that you've been told that you don't like studying he's 18 years old um and i'm very opposed to that because um he's doing a proper business he has a youtube channel he's reaching out to so many people he's doing a lot of very interesting things and i asked him on the podcast i said listen how did you how did you learn all of this it's like i went on youtube and i i saw videos and i learned and i was like okay so was that not education for you right and so for me what i find is we're actually we've defined a potential leader in our minds and we're trying to nurture that again and again and anyone who's an outlier and more often than not you'll find these kids to be the most critically thinking kids as well anyone who's an outlier we banish them and we sort of push them away from the system consistently is on getting straight a student distinction the students who are scoring well in our like you said yourself children are facing lots of issues at home they they are carrying a huge baggage sometimes uh teachers awareness sensitivity towards these students needs i have lots do you guys have career counseling in your school uh we have it but in a different way okay yes do you think there's there could be a better method because a lot of times you know i'm i'm i'm getting calls from kids and they're like listen by like what do you what do you think i should do like and the first question that they'll ask me is yeah is xyz huh and i find that very odd because i'm like listen like i mean scope is what you make it out to be right um you could be a i don't know you could be a prodigious guitarist and you could be a billionaire for all i care right um it entirely depends on what you're going to make out of me it's like oh i don't know i don't know myself to begin with yes career counseling we need to guide them into what fields they're supposed to go our children our children our high schoolers sometimes are lost they 85 000 uh women doctors in pakistan are not working and they've effectively basically they've wasted a seat of i mean demand supply society you know medical industry economy um and that's just an extremely inefficient thing you see that i was you know uh this one girl reached out and she was like you know i'm uh i'm a doctor and i spent five years consistently telling my parents i don't want to be i think you're the dentist huh you're like and they were like just take these subjects and you love me and i wanted to be a a makeup artist uh and so i was like you know let me do some sort of an art and it's not gonna be okay [Music] so i find that very very odd it's very how do you find parents generally beyond this as well how do you find the parents i mean you've been doing this for 30 years you probably had to talk to a lot of parents 30 years ago as well administration in our home parenting meetings how do you see the parents who have evolved so it's the school to blame right do you think there's a there's a particular thing in terms of ethics as well for example um um because growing up if something happened in my school in the school called my parents my parents were like but yeah i was in turkey a little while ago basically i think three four months five months before my child was born um and so you know when when you're about to have a child suddenly you start to realize that there are a lot of kids in the world before that you realize that that's true um and so so i was in turkey and and and two weeks we were there and so notice there was very it was very interesting there is no such thing as a pregnant woman it's like magic you know magically people get pregnant and they and i was looking at uh you know the minister of uh minister punjab and even he had a tweet recently if your family is in the family way and a lot of people were like what is the family wave why can't you just say you know if your family is pregnant um but you know turkey may and it's a muslim country so agara post context maybe i had current that's not a big deal but turkey mediatek you know they had pregnancy sections and clothing and everything was very boring it was very vibrant another thing we noticed was pakistan so very very young babies you know everybody had their kids on strollers they were going out they're out at the beach they did this they're that and so the environment was [Music] but the most interesting thing that i found out and this was like in younger kids not just in sort of infants but sort of like um you know toddlers or young kids um is that you i i don't remember a single incident of of hearing a child scream or cry or be rash where a parent is like listen stop doing this and so i'm telling you elect me so mary flight back to pakistan and i come to the counter where all the pakistanis are now gathering up right and there is this grandmother and there's two kids and the older boy is maybe like seven years old and there's a young girl four years old and the boy just keeps on like he's just randomly moving around then he come to the kid and they slap her and the grandmother is so the parents have given it could have been so great if if the parent was sitting here and saying hey listen you're not supposed to do this this is extremely wrong and you have you you reprimand the child but you represent now you learn to say no because you you're going to go in a society there is a legal system there are laws the child has to know okay there are certain things they can't do and certain things that you can't do then i came back to pakistan and i can i kid you not we started going to these baby stores right like these um you know and so a lot of these stores had like young parents coming in with kids and a new one coming in or even each other this is what i was saying earlier whatever we are feeding our children they're going [Music] [Music] it's very unfortunate um but again like like you said in the very start um you know there's someone like me who's thinking like this that i know all of my friends you know we have these discussions we have these conversations so definitely will eventually slowly and steadily move towards a more uh sort of human nature okay we will always go towards better so so there is hope always i'll ask a question we're almost at the one hour mark and that's where we sort of try to cut it down um i'll ask you one last question that's something that i ask every guest of mine um how do you see the pakistan of 2050 a difficult question there are a lot of good things going on [Laughter] my viewer awareness regarding um ethics regarding morals schools have uh again they have kind of um woken up to their responsibility which i think every leader should read and that school leader should read and that is if you don't feed the teachers they eat the students right so teachers if we are feeding them the right these influence are going to mold them into what they become tomorrow right right right right so and so what what what sort of what do you think can be made better uh made better like something that's great happening in pakistan but do you think there's something that definitely i mean uh so what do you think in pakistan what can you identify you know maybe that might hamper the growth of pakistan and agra fee can make it better if you can identify something like that women empowerment and focus on our values know at least identifying the values and then eventually uh creating the structures to bring us back to them uh ma'am sheena thank you so much for coming in thank you very much for having me again this was very very insightful you have a very sort of a calming voice uh okay i can i can totally imagine character students to him but like sort of they have that affinity right um so thank you so much and for all the insight that you shared um you know uh lots of respect for you for for what you do thank you so much for your service thank you um you know to the nation to the students who study from you and and for creating all the future leaders god bless you and for all of you guys thank you so much for watching subscribe my channel subscribe my channel subscribe you can join that group as well uh but anyways this was segmented you were watching thought behind things thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next one
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