PUBLISHED
July 06, 2025
KARACHI:
Having taught sociology for fourteen years at the high school level in Pakistan, I have found many of my students to be lacking in three areas in particular; originality of thought, lack of analytical output in the class and indifference to the value of the social sciences.
The three problems identified above are not only restricted to the private sector of primary and high school education in Pakistan but are more acute in the country’s public schools and colleges.
Our students need to be inspired by teachers themselves to come up with original ideas and innovative thoughts. While having classroom discussions with them on a variety of issues from rising divorce rates in Pakistani society to the qualitative input which might be of use in designing a research outlay for a school project, I have found many of them to be restricted in their thinking and consequently, in their effort put into the particular task. This can be due to, amongst other factors, the years of social conditioning by both their families and households and the society that they witness.
To counter this, a teacher must know that students in the vital age group of 10-16 must not be held back in their creative and valuable contributions to class discussions.
The administrative hierarchy of educational administrators should realise this too.
At the same time, students must realise that it is important to not only be novel in the presentation of an idea to the class but that it should also be analytically worthy of thoughtful reflection.
For that, they will have to forget stereotypical images, centred on class, gender, racial and ethnic divisions and preconceived (and untrue) notions of what it means to be a human in relationship to the society around us in the modern/postmodern world of today.
This is the task that teachers of today need to be well aware of, if they want to guide the original minds of tomorrow.
Beautiful minds such as Stephen Hawkings, John Nash and Sayyed Hossein Nasr of today and Leo Tolstoy, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Rabindranath Tagore of yesteryears need to be taken on board to build a ‘collective conscience’ for the world of tomorrow.
Poets such as Hu Shi, Yosano Akiko, Goethe, Wordsworth and Iqbal must be read and reread if we are to succeed in this huge task in front of us.
Shakespeare must be contextualised in the Pakistani society around us if the country’s students of today are to build bridges of understanding and humanity with the world of tomorrow. In this world, knowledge should not have a ‘price tag’ and it must be imparted for the intrinsic good it entails.
They should be made to understand how curiosity, guided in the right direction, leads to an inquisitive mindset, which knows no boundaries at all, when it comes to reaching the frontiers of information. This yearning for knowledge must be nurtured and respected both within and outside the country’s classrooms.
Lastly, the need for us to understand the value of social sciences and social scientists for today’s Pakistan.
Social sciences need to be emphasised as very important if the Pakistani state and its future (the students of today) are to take head-on the challenges that afflict the nation and the obscure mindset of its citizens today.
Social sciences such as economics, sociology and liberal arts subjects such as historiography have built nations.
Unfortunately, Pakistani academia has yet to realise the full potential of an education in social sciences. Our students need to be liberated from the conventional paradigm of a sciences-commerce duality and need to be made to understand the primacy of social sciences in today’s world.
As AI transforms the education sector today, social sciences offer a huge insider view of the changes that will be wrought on the education sector both within and outside the classroom. It offers us a window into the view that society will be massively impacted by the new information age and in order to succeed in this information age, students will have to decouple themselves from conventional ideas of classroom education.
Social sciences are bound to offer careers of tomorrow ranging from research, academia and the changing face of government and public policy. And the human will stand at the primal chord of these massive societal fissures. Appropriate would it be that Pakistani students recognise the potential of this huge transformation.
Lastly, ethics will be a fundamental part of this new scope of education. Pakistani parents, teachers and the students themselves should be made to remember this valuable lesson. It means that education and the process of imparting it in Pakistan must have an ethical angle too.
Ethics and morality do play an important part in all didactic goals and this aspect of education can no longer be ignored, especially in the age of AI. If it is considered, then education should be imparted in a value-free way (perfection over here cannot be reached) since all positive philosophy, interactionist experiments and laboratory products need to be associated with the ‘Ultimate Good’, that is, the pursuit of education for its intrinsic worth.
Ethics and morality infused with humanism will go a long way to answer the gripping questions that are bound to emerge in the society of tomorrow. In this discourse, education cannot be constrained from ethics and a humanistic pedagogy. For instance, taking just one cue of the question of what knowledge is, in the future will involve a lot of ethical dilemmas and queries.
There needs to be given a global perspective to education in Pakistan today. If it is not granted, then historiography will remain scribe versions of actual history, geography will continue to ignore significant monuments of interest to the geologist of the future and the social sciences will miss out on the things that need to be ‘taught’ in a classroom environment.
The coming world of education will ask us fundamental questions of what knowledge is, how should it be pursued and what it means to be a knowledgeable human. AI will transform the education sector and the world beyond education to a huge degree. In this sense, our students need to be made aware of the challenges of tomorrow and the innovative and engaging ways to overcome them.
It is an age of knowledge. And knowledge will remain powerful in this age.
Taimur Arbab is a teacher of Sociology and a writer based in Karachi
All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the author
