Pakistan's schools are built to give grades, not education

From navy postings to twenty years in a classroom

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation bluntly: education is, in his personal view, the single biggest threat to Pakistan’s future — more consequential than climate change or food security. He has been deliberately seeking out people with real experience in the system, not just opinions about it.

Bilal Hameed is the first to speak about his background. Born in Karachi on the naval island of Manora — accessible mainly by boat — he spent his childhood moving between cities as his father’s Pakistan Navy postings dictated. He graduated with a computer science degree from Rutgers in 2002, having also completed a minor in Middle Eastern studies that he describes as intellectually transformative. He returned to Pakistan immediately after graduation, not by choice but by necessity: as the eldest child, he had to support his family.

“Kids don’t need experts to teach them,” Bilal says, reflecting on how he stumbled into teaching. “They need somebody who just knows a little bit more than them.” He started with evening tuitions, then joined a school in the mornings, and discovered he was good at it. Within a few years he was helping found Nixar College — spending nights at a Costa café in Karachi building the admissions model and curriculum from scratch — and later Cedar College, which he describes as one of the first schools in Karachi set up entirely by teachers rather than investors or administrators.

Asad Hashamali’s path is different in texture but similar in direction. Born in Hong Kong to a trading family, he moved to Dallas in 2001 and watched the Twin Towers fall on a classroom television screen. He arrived in Pakistan in 2005, did his O and A levels at Lyceum, and completed an economics and finance degree through the University of London’s international program while working simultaneously. He joined Cedar College as an intern in 2015, eventually building its digital media and communications department — a department that did not exist before he proposed it.

The founding logic of Alt Academy

Alt Academy began, in Bilal’s telling, as a side project: free YouTube content for A-level Chemistry, Physics, and Economics students, started around 2018 and bootstrapped entirely by him. The logic was simple. The total global population of students sitting Cambridge A-level Chemistry in any given year is roughly 30,000. Monetizing that audience through ads makes no sense. But giving those students free access to high-quality content could free up their time for everything else.

“I wanted them to have more skills and more time on their hands,” Bilal explains. “As a nation, we have a lot of young kids who want to develop something. They need to develop. Otherwise, as a nation, our economy won’t grow.”

COVID accelerated the shift to digital but Bilal deliberately chose not to launch a paid product during the pandemic, not wanting the business to appear opportunistic. By 2021, with Asad joining full time after winding down his role at his consultancy Backspace, they raised a seed round and moved into a proper startup structure. By the time of this recording, Alt Academy had served over 55,000 students across YouTube and third-party platforms, and had just launched a paywall in beta two weeks prior.

The core product proposition is compression. Bilal lays out the arithmetic plainly: a student in Karachi, Lahore, or Islamabad pays roughly six lakh rupees per year to attend an A-level school, but actually receives only twenty-five to twenty-eight weeks of classroom instruction. The same content, he argues, can be delivered in approximately eighty hours — fifty hours of video and thirty hours of practice. “You can do this whole thing that people are saying takes two years in six months,” he says.

Why edtech keeps rebuilding the same broken thing

Muzamil pushes back on a tension he has noticed across every edtech conversation he has had: most players claim to be reimagining education but are actually just digitizing the tuition model. Bilal agrees without hesitation.

The deeper problem, he argues, is that almost every edtech startup in Pakistan is led by people with technology or business backgrounds, not educators. “Most of them have not spent more than a year in a classroom,” he says. Alt Academy’s differentiator, in his view, is that at least four of its founding members have twenty years of classroom experience each and still fill eighty-student classrooms daily in Karachi. That credibility — students knowing and trusting the teachers — is something a technology-first startup cannot replicate quickly.

Asad adds a structural point: edtech companies default to the high-school segment not because it is the most important problem but because it is the easiest to digitize. “A ninth grade, tenth grade class is not engaging. It’s a lecture model. Lecture models are the easiest to digitize.” MIT’s open courseware, he notes, was exactly this — record a lecture, put it online. Every subsequent wave of edtech has followed the same path of least resistance.

Muzamil presses further: if the real scale opportunity is the millions of young Pakistanis entering the workforce every year, why is nobody building for that? Bilal’s answer is candid. Early childhood education is too capital-intensive and too dependent on physical presence to be a tech startup. University-level innovation is blocked by HEC licensing requirements — you need acres of land, PhDs on staff, and government approval. High school is the only segment where the content is standardized enough to compress and the regulatory barriers are low enough to enter.

The parent problem and the adoption wall

Later in the discussion, Muzamil identifies what he sees as the central adoption challenge: the paying customer is not the student. It is the parent. And parents, particularly in Karachi, are deeply conservative about changing anything related to their child’s schooling.

Bilal confirms this from his own experience running Cedar. He had introduced a set of eight elective courses — graphic design, world politics, history of the Second World War — that students could take alongside their A-levels with no exam attached. Some students loved them. But when grades dipped, parents blamed the electives. “Many parents said, times are limited, I need my child to get grades only. So shut it down.” The courses were discontinued.

The consumer psychology problem is compounded by what Bilal calls a missing critical mass. Parents will not shift their behavior until enough other parents have already shifted. “It’s like that. When Google came, they were not the first search engine. First there was Yahoo, Alta Vista. They made it better. Right now, we’re not even there yet. We’re not even at Alta Vista. People are still thinking, no, my child will go to the classroom.”

Asad frames the same problem from a product design angle, drawing a comparison to TikTok’s onboarding. Instagram requires a username before showing any content. TikTok shows content immediately and asks for a sign-up ten minutes later, auto-generating a username so the barrier to entry is near zero. “How do you onboard consumers in a way that they will be your customer not today but six months from now?” Most edtech platforms, he argues, are looking for customers who are ready to pay today rather than building demand among people who are not yet convinced.

What mastery-based learning actually means

One of the sharpest conceptual moments in the conversation comes when Bilal describes mastery-based learning — and why schools are the only domain in human life where we do not apply it.

“You don’t put your child on a bicycle and say, three days of cycling, you fell twice, your grade is B, now let’s go play tennis. You will ensure that they can cycle and then you’ll take them somewhere.” The same logic applies to multiplication before indices, to foundational grammar before essay writing. But in schools, the entire class moves forward on a fixed schedule regardless of whether any individual child has actually understood the previous concept. The weakest foundations are laid for the students who need the most time, and those students carry the gaps forward for years.

Technology, Bilal argues, does not solve this problem by itself — but it enables the solution. Once content delivery is separated from the classroom, teachers can stop being lecturers and start being facilitators who push individual students toward mastery at their own pace. “The role of the school and the teacher has to drastically change. A teacher should no longer be the person standing there to give expert knowledge.”

The vision: schools as social spaces, content from the world’s best

By the end of the conversation, Bilal articulates a vision of education that is more radical than anything Alt Academy is currently selling. Morning school time, he argues, should be reserved entirely for social learning — MUN, sports, projects, community service, citizenship. The academic content that currently fills those hours should be delivered through high-quality video, made by the best teachers in the world, watched by students on their own time.

“What we’ve done in schools is we’ve removed all the fun out of them,” he says. “When a kid enters my class, you can see the life has been drained out of him. He’s tired. He doesn’t want to be here.” The flipped classroom model — where students consume content at home and use class time for discussion and application — is not a new idea. Khan Academy has been building toward it for over a decade. But Pakistan has not even acknowledged it exists.

Muzamil asks both guests to think about AI and personalization: what does education look like in ten years if every child can have a learning experience tailored to their level and interests? Bilal’s answer returns to history. The best learning in human civilization happened through personal tutors — people responsible for introducing a single student to ideas, pushing their curiosity, and ensuring mastery before moving on. “I think the future of education is going to mimic the history of how people learned.” AI makes that model scalable. The most engaging content will be produced by a small number of world-class creators. The role of the teacher in the room becomes that of a coach and motivator, not a knowledge-imparter.

Pakistan in 2050: hard decisions or boundary-lessness

Muzamil closes by asking both guests how they see Pakistan in 2050. Bilal’s answer is deliberately unsentimental. He stopped making long-range predictions because Pakistan has confounded optimism too many times. “If I had predicted what Pakistan could look like twenty years ago, I would be a very cynical man by now.” His structural read is that Pakistan as a nation responds to external pressure better than internal will. The change in education will come either from large employers dropping degree requirements — forcing the entire certification system to reckon with its irrelevance — or from external financial bodies demanding structural reform as a condition of support.

Asad’s answer is more personal. He has spent seventeen years watching it become harder for Pakistanis to coexist across every strata of society. His hope for 2050 is not economic but attitudinal: that his generation will have unlearned and relearned enough times to arrive at a version of the country defined by humility, depth, and tolerance. “My vision for 2050 is that this generation will have unlearned and relearned so many times that we will figure out a way to make sure we can all coexist but also humbly continue to excel.”

Both guests agree on one thing: the thought leaders who could shift the national conversation are more likely to emerge from TikTok than from any institution. The platform has already democratized visibility in ways that television and print never did. “I think we are one or two moral or thought leaders away from rising as a nation,” Bilal says. “Not political leaders. Thought leaders.”

Muzamil wraps the two-hour conversation with a rare public endorsement: of all the edtech founders he has spoken to, Alt Academy is the one that has genuinely excited him — not just for the vision articulated on camera, but for what he observed off it as well.