Every Pakistani child has chanted the times tables. But are they learning multiplication — or just a sound? And what is the rest of the world already doing differently?
"Two ones za two. Two twos za four. Two threes za six."
Every Pakistani child has chanted this. We chanted it. Our parents chanted it. Our grandparents chanted it. (My khala, honestly, still mutters them under her breath when she is calculating discounts at Khaadi. Some habits do not die.)
But here is the thing.
If you stop a 7-year-old mid-chant and ask, "Beta, what does 'za' actually mean?" they will look at you the way you would look at someone asking you to translate ancient Chinese.
Because they do not know.
They have no idea that "za" is simply a child's mishearing of "are." That "two ones are two" means "if you have two groups of one apple, you have two apples."
They are saying it perfectly. They are passing the tables test. They might even win the class recital prize.
But they are not learning multiplication. They are learning a sound.
And that small, perfectly ordinary classroom moment is the entire story of what's quietly broken in our education system. And, more importantly, what's quietly being fixed in the rest of the world.
The world has shifted. Quietly. Steadily. Without much fanfare.
Here is something most parents in Pakistan do not know.
Finland, which has consistently ranked among the world's top education systems, has been moving away from subject-based teaching in early years since 2018.
Singapore, the country that used to define academic rigour, has been shifting toward inquiry-based learning for over a decade.
Even Cambridge, that staple of every middle-class Pakistani school dream, has quietly published research saying long-term retention from pure memorisation drops below 25% within six months.
In other words, three-quarters of what we make our children memorise simply leaves their heads by the next term.
That is not the children's fault. That is how human brains are designed.
We learn what we use. We forget what we don't.
What modern classrooms actually look like in the rest of the world.
In a primary school in Helsinki, Year 2 children learn multiplication by physically laying out objects on the floor. Buttons. Stones. Sometimes their own shoes when nothing else is around. By the time they recite a table, they have touched it, counted it, rearranged it, and understood it. The chant is the last step, not the first.
In Reggio Emilia, the small Italian town that famously rewrote early childhood education, children learn maths through long-term projects that can run for weeks, building a model city. Designing a pretend grocery shop. Planning a class garden. The maths emerges from the project, not from a worksheet. By the time a Reggio child meets multiplication, they have already lived inside it.
In a Tokyo primary school, teachers are trained never to explain a concept until the children have first tried to discover it themselves. They call this "productive struggle." It looks, to an outside observer, almost like the teacher is doing nothing. But it produces some of the strongest mathematical minds in the world, year after year.
In Stockholm, primary schools are slowly removing screens from the youngest classrooms entirely, after years of research showing that handwriting and physical play build long-term memory pathways that screens simply cannot.
These are not eccentric experiments. They are the standard in education systems that consistently outperform ours, by a wide margin, on every measure that matters.
What "moving past memorisation" actually means.
This is the part that gets misunderstood. So let me say it plainly.
It does not mean throwing out facts. Children still need their multiplication tables. They still need basic vocabulary, basic history, and basic dates. Facts are tools. We need them.
What it means is this: the thinking that uses the tools is the goal. Not the recitation.
A child who chants "2 ones za two" has memorised a sound. A child who knows that 2 baskets of 1 apple equals 2 apples has understood something. A child who can then ask, "What if there were 5 baskets?" without being told to, has crossed into real learning.
We need all three. But we have been celebrating only the first for far too long.
So what does this look like in a Pakistani classroom?
Honestly? It looks like very small shifts. None of these requires a new building, a new curriculum, or a new fee.
Read aloud for ten minutes a day. Add one open-ended question to every test. Replace one homework sheet a week with a real-world task. (How much does our family spend on roti in a month? Find out.) Let children ask the first question of the lesson, before the teacher speaks.
That's it. Begin there.
If you are a parent reading this, the most useful single thing you can do is stop asking your child, "What marks did you get?" and start asking, "What did you find interesting today?"
The first question makes them anxious. The second one makes them think.
This part gives me hope.
Some new schools in Pakistan are quietly beginning to do this work too. I'm from Karachi, so I see it more closely than most. There are classrooms here that have begun to slow down. Teachers who are nurturing curiosity instead of crushing it. Principals who have made room for play, for projects, for the messy, beautiful business of a child actually thinking.
I am the happiest to see this work happening. I just hope the schools that are still running on conventional engines — with the chant in the morning and the worksheet in the afternoon — follow suit soon. The world is not waiting. Our children certainly aren't.
(In another post, I will share a list of Karachi schools you can look at if you want this kind of learning for your child. Schools that are raising observers and explorers, not rote learners.)
A small note from us at School Connect.
We don't run classrooms. That is the school's craft, and we have deep respect for it. What we build is the EdTech that supports this kind of thinking-first learning.
Because the technology in a child's school journey should reflect the same values that their teachers are building in the classroom. Slowly. Patiently. One thinking moment at a time.
If you are a school rep reading this, let's talk.
