I was recently at a roundtable in Karachi of industry and higher education representatives, to discuss how Pakistan’s education system can better fulfill the hiring needs of employers. During this event, a gentleman fervently asserted how the scale of Pakistan’s education crisis was just too large for traditional schooling to address, and that educational technology (edtech) was the only way to educate every child. This is not a new pipedream.

For many decades, policymakers have sought quick solutions to low student learning outcomes, by treating technology as a panacea to teaching quality woes.

However, this thinking stands in stark contrast to Pakistan’s ground reality. The 2023 Annual Status of Education Report found that 30 percent of government schools in Pakistan did not have useable furniture; 25 percent did not have an electricity connection; only 14.5 percent of elementary schools and 51.2 percent of secondary schools had computer labs; and a mere 14.2 percent of Sindh’s schools had internet. Furthermore, 24 percent of primary schools in the country were single-teacher schools, according to Pakistan Education Statistics 2023-24.

It appears that Pakistan is caught between two starkly different worlds — the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and rapid technological advancements on the one hand, and severe resource limitations on the other.

It is imprudent to fully reject the role of technology in our education system, but it is equally unwise to take a Marie Antoinette-inspired approach of decreeing that all children should have devices to educate them.

Pakistan is caught between two starkly different worlds — the age of artificial intelligence and rapid technological advancements on the one hand, and severe resource limitations on the other. Can its youth ever hope to catch up? Policymakers have long sought quick solutions to low learning outcomes for its children. But education expert Salma A. Alam argues that unthinkingly throwing money towards technology for schools is not the solution

How then should Pakistan set its education agenda, keeping the age of AI in mind, yet staying true to our indigenous constraints?

STUDENT COMPETENCIES FOR THE AI ERA

To understand this, let’s first define what the age of AI requires. To succeed in this era, school graduates need to possess far more than subject knowledge — they must be able to work with technology, solve complex problems and be independent learners in a rapidly changing world.

Dr Xiaodong Huang, an associate professor at Capital Normal University in Beijing, China, proposes the cultivation of six essential competencies within students, which focus not only on the acquisition of basic knowledge and basic skills, but also on the cultivation of the qualities necessary for the individual’s adaptation to, survival in and agency over the future society. These key competencies include:

Skill competence: students master good learning habits, and develop logical, abstract and critical thinking, and observation and analysis skills through a variety of learning tasks.

Cultural competence: students’ understanding of various cultural backgrounds and humanistic ideas.

Teamwork competence: students’ ability to foster interpersonal relationships and to communicate with students in a team.

Human-tool collaboration competence: students’ ability to recognise various tools and use them properly.

Self-learning competence: students acquire knowledge through independent analysis, exploration, practice, questioning and creation.

Cognitive competence: students’ ability to feel, perceive and represent things and the ability to judge, reason, analyse and draw conclusions.

While Dr Huang’s 2021........

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