Does school fuel insecurities?

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.