Everyone who has been fortunate enough to see the inside of one, can narrate their own experience. But besides the exquisite calligraphy and alphabet charts; the unusual science paraphernalia; the posture-distorting seats; the students with heavy eyelids and blank faces; it is always the teacher that makes the classroom complete.

Armed with knowledge and affection, teachers are supposed to inculcate in their students a hunger for making the unknown known. On the other hand, they also have to maintain a stable, disciplined learning environment, with a healthy mix of appreciation and punitive measures.

To this end, the most harmful weapon available in their arsenal used to be the dreaded exam results, but that just might change.

Of the more strange decisions to come after the Peshawar school massacre, the one about teachers getting firearm training and permission to carry weapons within school premises in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province is certainly way up there.

It almost seems unreal that the people who bicker over the detrimental effects of one syllabus over the other have shown little discomfort with the introduction of guns in classrooms.

To guard the nearly 35,000 schools and colleges in the province, the KP administration has admitted to the shortage of security personnel, and resorted to desperate measures in these desperate times.

This particular decision demonstrates the biggest issue we face today as a nation: the issue of survival.

And the most obvious explanation of our bizarre actions is found in the fact that we are in damage control mode, trying to save as much as we can for as long as we can.

Long gone are the days when we could take measures to correct the path of this ship; now, the only thing we can do is to keep on plugging holes in the deck until a bigger tide threatens to engulf us all.

The decision to make guns available in classrooms will have long-term repercussions.

Following Peshawar, schools are already looking more and more like military barracks than places of learning and inquiry, and in such a scenario, the increased presence of weapons is bound to leave a lasting impression on the psyche of young minds.

The increased weaponisation of the Pakistani society after our Afghan adventure in the '80s, and the consequences it brought, should have been enough to serve as a warning, but that does not seem to be the case.

Adopting guns as the solution to life’s bigger problems has already left many developed societies crippled by the outfall, and we cannot afford to make the same mistakes. No matter how much a sense of security weapons exude, their potential as ultimately life-threatening objects must also figure in the decision-making calculus.

Perhaps we can learn a few things from the American experience in this regard, where proliferation of firearms has wreaked havoc multiple times, in educational institutions and elsewhere as well.