Posted on July 06, 2025
Karachi:
Having taught sociology for fourteen years secondary in Pakistan,, I found that many of my students were missing in three areas in particular; Originality of thought, lack of analytical outing in class and indifference to the value of the social sciences.
The three problems identified above are not only limited to the private sector of primary education and secondary in Pakistan, but are more acute in public schools and colleges in the country.
Our students must be inspired by the teachers themselves to offer original ideas and innovative thoughts. While having discussions in class with them on a variety of problems, the increase in divorce rates in Pakistani society with qualitative contributions which could be useful for designing a research expenditure for a school project, I found that many of them were limited in their reflection and, therefore, in their efforts in the particular task. This may be due, among other things, the years of social conditioning by their families and the households and the society they witness.
To counter this, a teacher should know that students in the vital age group from 10 to 16 years old should not be retained in their creative and precious contributions to class discussions.
The administrative hierarchy of education administrators should also realize it.
At the same time, students must realize that it is important not only to be new in the presentation of an idea to the class, but that it should also be analytically worthy of thoughtful reflection.
For this, they will have to forget the stereotypical images, centered on class, gender, racial and ethnic divisions and preconceived (and false) concepts of what it means to be a human in relation to the society around us in the modern / postmodern world today.
This is the task of which teachers of today must be well aware, if they want to guide the original spirit of tomorrow.
Beautiful spirits such as Stephen Hawkings, John Nash and Sayyed Hossein Nasr of today and Leo Tolstoy, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Rabindranath Tagore of yesteryear 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 connected if we want to succeed in this huge task in front of us.
Shakespeare must be contextualized in Pakistani society around us if the students of today’s country should build bridges of understanding and humanity with the world of tomorrow. In this world, knowledge should not have a “price” and it must be transmitted for the intrinsic good that it implies.
They must be forced to understand how curiosity, guided in the right direction, leads to a curious state of mind, which knows no borders, when it comes to reaching the boundaries of information. This desire for knowledge must be nourished and respected inside and outside the country’s classrooms.
Finally, the need for us to understand the value of social sciences and social science specialists for Pakistan today.
The social sciences must be highlighted as very important if the Pakistani state and its future (students today) must meet the challenges that afflict the nation and the dark state of mind of its citizens today.
Social sciences such as economics, sociology and liberal arts subjects such as historiography have built nations.
Unfortunately, the Pakistani academic world has not yet carried out the full potential of an education in the social sciences. Our students must be freed from the conventional paradigm of a duplicity of science and must be made to understand the primacy of the social sciences in the world today.
While the AI transforms the education sector today, the social sciences offer an enormous initial vision of changes that will be forged in the education sector inside and outside the class. It offers us a window on the idea that the company will be massively affected by the new era of information and in order to succeed in this time of information, students will have to decade from conventional ideas from education to class.
The social sciences will offer tomorrow’s careers ranging from research, the academic world and the evolution of the government’s face and public policies. And the human will be held to the primordial rope of these massive societal cracks. Pakistani students should recognize the potential of this enormous transformation.
Finally, ethics will be a fundamental element of this new scope of education. Pakistani parents, teachers and students themselves should be made to remember this precious lesson. This means that education and the transmission process in Pakistan must also have an ethical angle.
Ethics and morality play an important role in all didactic objectives and this aspect of education can no longer be ignored, in particular in the AI era. If it is considered, then education must be transmitted without value (perfection here cannot be reached) because all positive philosophies, interactional experiences and laboratory products must be associated with “ultimate good”, that is to say the pursuit of education for its intrinsic value.
Ethics and morality impregnated with humanism will greatly contribute to answering the captivating questions that can emerge in the society of tomorrow. In this discourse, education cannot be limited of ethics and humanist pedagogy. For example, taking a single index of the question of what knowledge is in the future will imply many dilemmas and ethical requests.
We must give a global perspective to education in Pakistan today. If it is not granted, then historiography will remain scribe versions of real history, geography will continue to ignore the important monuments of interest for the geologist of the future and the social sciences will miss the things that must be “taught” in a class environment.
The future world of education will ask us fundamental questions of what knowledge is, how should it be continued and what it means to be a competent human. The AI will transform the education sector and the world beyond education into an enormous measure. In this sense, our students must be informed of the challenges of tomorrow and of the innovative and engaging means to overcome them.
It is an era of knowledge. And knowledge will remain powerful at this age.
Taimur Arbab is a professor of sociology and a writer based in Karachi
All the facts and information are the sole responsibility of the author
