The Education Debate Ignores the Only Thing That Actually Matters

Sometimes I stop and realize how improbable my journey has been. My mother raised me in Pakistan, a country where the GDP per capita hovers around $1,400, yet she prepared me so well in English, math, and science that I eventually earned the chance to study medicine in America.

She wasn’t some career educator. She never worked a formal job. She wasn’t trained in pedagogy. She could barely use a computer. Yet she built my education, brick by brick, in ways that most people in the wealthiest country in the world would call extreme, if not impossible.

I’ll never forget the time we flew from Lebanon to Pakistan to visit my grandmother. The nearest airport was four hours from our destination. Most parents would have let the kid sleep, stare out the window, or play games. My mother hopped into the backseat with me, pulled out next year’s math textbook, and sat with me for the entire ride. Chapter after chapter, exercise after exercise, she made sure I pushed through it. By the time we arrived, I had already finished half of the upcoming year’s curriculum.

This wasn’t a one-off. It was her way of life. Before cooking dinner, she would scribble practice problems for me on a sheet of paper, leave me to work them out while she cooked, and check my answers when she came back. If I had to read a book for school and write an essay, she would read the entire book herself—cover to cover—so she could fairly critique my writing, point out what I had missed, and force me to expand my arguments. She wasn’t even particularly good at math herself, so she would phone an aunt, an uncle, or occasionally my dad to help me work through a problem. But she never let me hit a wall alone.

She drilled discipline into us in small, almost symbolic ways. When we came home from school, we weren’t allowed to toss our backpacks into a corner like every other kid. We had to carry them to our desks and place them gently. The message was unmistakable: how dare you treat your education like a burden you can’t wait to drop? If you can’t even bear the weight of your backpack with respect, you don’t deserve the education inside it. At the time, it felt harsh. In hindsight, it was true.

By the time I was 10 or 11, she didn’t need to press so hard anymore. The system she built had already become self-sustaining. She would walk into my room and find me reading random Wikipedia pages for fun, teaching myself things neither she, nor my teachers, nor anyone else knew about. I remember I’d go down Wikipedia rabbit holes learning about quarks and blackholes and the Bohr model. She had flipped the switch from external pressure to internal drive. At that point I wasn’t doing schoolwork anymore—I was learning to teach myself.

And here’s the real crazy part I still have a hard time fathoming sometimes: English was not even her first language. It was her second. And yet she insisted on making it my first because she figured I’d learn Urdu passively through social interactions.

Think about how insane that is. Imagine you half-learned French or Spanish as an adult—not fluent, just “good enough”—and then decided that when your child was born, their first language would be French or Spanish. You’d buy the textbooks you barely understood yourself, you’d teach day after day for a decade, and somehow, you’d succeed so completely that your child grew up fluent. That’s what she did with English. She willed it into being. And let’s not forget this wasn’t a woman who ever thought I’d end up in America, she just thought it’d make me sharper.

So she did most of this in Pakistan, where the infrastructure itself fought our every step. Electricity would cut out for hours every day. The internet was unreliable well into my teens, and video/ YouTube was almost inaccessible at any consistent quality. Textbooks were outdated, libraries nonexistent, and schools obsessed with rote memorization instead of critical thinking. My mother didn’t like the way my schools taught and decided to take charge herself, even though she didn’t have the training or the resources.

This is why I find it baffling that in the United States—the richest country in the world—children routinely fall below grade level despite billions poured into schools, reforms, and technology. The uncomfortable truth is this: a disengaged parent in a wealthy nation will raise a child less prepared than a committed parent in a poor one.

And before people make stupid claims about the poorest Americans: I’m not talking about them. Their struggles are real and shaped by unique, crushing economic inequalities. I’m talking about middle-class American families—people with reliable electricity, stable internet, and schools stocked with resources. The shocking thing is that a child in Lahore, Pakistan, on the other side of the world, with outdated textbooks, failing infrastructure, and electricity for only half the day, can actively compete with kids in middle-class America. And it’s not just me, it’s also thousands of other Pakistani kids, from similar backgrounds, who manage to earn competitive financial aid offers to come study here after scoring in the 98th+ percentile on the SATs— an exam literally catered to the American school system.

That should unsettle us. Not because it condemns those families, but because it shows we are focused on the wrong things. We obsess over policy tweaks, gadgets, and programs while neglecting the foundation: parenting, discipline, and values.

My mother, with no job, no wealth, and English as her second language, made English my first, math my discipline, and curiosity my lifelong habit. That is not easy. That is not something any policy or technology can replicate. It took willpower, sacrifice, and conviction.

And so when I look at America’s educational struggles, I don’t buy the excuses. I don’t believe that another billion dollars in funding will solve the problem if the family itself has abdicated its role. If a woman in Pakistan, facing every imaginable disadvantage, could still pull this off, then what excuse does the wealthiest society in history really have?

The answer is none. If we want to fix education, stop looking first to Washington, Silicon Valley, or the school board. Start looking at the dinner table conversations, the living room, the backpack ritual, the parent who decides whether curiosity lives or dies.

Because the truth is simple: parenting, not policy, is the driver of education. And the sooner we admit that, the sooner we’ll stop failing our children.

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P.S. I think this is why Kumon is so popular in Asian communities in America. It is the closest thing to productizing this experience, and its results show that it is extremely effective.