Teach Your Own: Lessons from Pakistan

October 8, 2025

By Humphrey Kutosi

I wish all mornings were the same, but this one was different. Our baby woke us up at 4:00 AM. Ever raised one? Then you know it’s never pleasant. I couldn’t go back to sleep. So rather than waste the productive early morning hours, I picked up my laptop and began working on a website gig someone had given me. 

In the course of doing so, I happened to visit Facebook and came across this photo of the first page of a Grade 10 physics textbook from Pakistan. Indians were trolling the Pakistanis for having their Muslim religion at the center of their education system. 

Now to me, that was not funny at all. What they saw as a joke, I saw as the determination to educate their young ones and soak them in the Islamic worldview, even in subjects such as physics. This God-centered approach to learning is exactly what’s missing in Uganda’s public schools. But do Christian parents even care? 

The Pakistanis are schooling us about putting God at the center of education. But I hate that we have to learn this from the infidels.

Analyzing the Pakistani Approach

Let’s check out a few lines from the introduction of that textbook. It says that “Almighty Allah created this universe billions of years ago with a single word ’be’, and at once it came into being.” 

In all my entire life, from primary to law school, did I ever encounter a textbook that pointed all things back to God? Nope. You? Yet this Pakistani physics book unapologetically says that the laws of nature were created by God. Furthermore, the credit for man’s learning is given to God by saying that he has placed in man the curiosity to study creation. The primacy of man in creation is also emphasized. We are not apes. Rather, man is “the best creature of Allah in the world and has been endowed with many qualities.”

Muslims in Pakistan, as in other Islamic countries, take the religious education of their children very seriously. Islam is a compulsory subject throughout school. Everybody studies it. On top of that, they have the madrasahs, where children are sent to study the Quran, Sharia and other Islamic writings alongside logic, mathematics, and philosophy. The same is true in Sudan. 

And what are the results? Pastor Obed Muhereza and I have shared the gospel to many students at Makerere University. Both to those who call themselves Christians and those who are Muslims from Sudan. The difference between these two groups is staggering. Obed hammers it down:

The average so-called Christian student at Makerere that we have ever discussed with, concerning matters of faith, does not know God, does not know the Bible, and does not care whether they know God or not. Faith is not something that matters to them. They believe that Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus, can all go to heaven, provided they fulfill what their religions require from them. They believe that all man needs is to do good things. Whether he knows Christ or not, it doesn’t matter. 

Why is it that many so-called christian students think this way? Because Christian Parents are not catechizing their children.

And, the Muslims from Sudan? They recite the Quran off-head. They can defend their faith pretty well. Their faith is something that seriously matters to them. Why? Because their parents catechized them from childhood.

Why is This the Case?

Things are like this because we, Christian parents, have abandoned the biblical practice of educating our own. 

I can already see eyebrows rising and smoke detectors warning. But this is how God designed it. God has entrusted children to parents, not to the government. We are not mere nannies for the state’s children. 

Indoctrination is happening in the public schools, where God is shown not to be really important to our life. But Jesus said “Whoever is not with me is against me” (Matthew 12:30). Question: Is your child’s education centered around Jesus? If it isn’t, it’s against him. There is no such thing as a neutral education! Every education is either for God or against him.

So what do you expect of children who have been told that God, if he even exists,  is irrelevant? That he has no connection to biology, chemistry, physics, or mathematics? A godless worldview. 

Abraham Kuyper was right: Is there a square inch of creation, or of a home, or of a classroom, over which Christ does not cry, ‘Mine’? To leave God out of a subject is not to remain neutral. No, it is to declare independence from the One by whom and for whom all things exist.

How do you study biology without the Creator of life? Physics without the One who wrote the laws of nature? Math without the mind behind logic? Civics without the King of the universe? History without the Ancient of Days? This nonsense can only stand if God does not exist. And that’s precisely what secular education assumes. 

No wonder so many so-called Christian students at the university don’t know God. They do not think about eternity. They have been secularized. They’ve been indoctrinated into unbelief. 

The fix to this mess is in the black and white of every Bible: a distinctly Christian education centered at home.

You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.—Deuteronomy 6:7

God has entrusted the education of children to their parents. Not to the government. He expects parents to spend time with their children, teaching them his Word at every turn; at home, on the road, at bedtime and in the morning. The current set up where parents have surrendered their right and duty to raise their children, is foreign to Scripture.

Conclusion

This is one of those unhappy moments when the children of the devil are wiser than the children of God. While the Muslims are worshiping a false god, they worship him sincerely, and seriously. And they make all efforts to ensure that their children also do the same, as they incorporate their Islamic worldview into every aspect of life. Meanwhile, the church is napping while the devil loots her crib. It’s high time that the bells rang to rouse Christians from their spellish slumber. Let us teach our own.