“The state of education in Pakistan is bleak.”

Cliches like this have now descended into the ludicrous. Indeed, the state of education is abysmal, as it has been at the end of every year for all the years that one can remember.

School education still lacks direction and is divided into sectors based on the privilege of access. The intermediate system is a complete failure. It seems that nobody cares enough to find an alternative.

Higher education is polarised by national politics. Several universities lack full-time leadership and will remain so until after an elected government has assumed office.

In some cases, university faculty are being paid half of their salaries because of the financial crisis the country faces. Admissions have dropped this year due to a combination of factors including raised fees and reduced affordability as many parents have lost their jobs or suffered losses in their businesses.

The Higher Education Commission’s undergraduate and graduate education policies are steps in the right direction but these too are constrained by the systemic limitations of policymaking in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, any attempts at reforming university structures and prioritising academics are met with resistance by vested interests on campuses. Thus, the little good work that is being done gets overshadowed by ‘the campus culture’ which is a sad reproduction of the street culture prevalent in Pakistan.

Many students enrolled in universities prioritise their online businesses or jobs over their classes and claim to make a very good salary from their freelance or other work, emphasising that a university degree will not give them similar or better opportunities. As a result, if the brain drain was worrisome in 2002, it is positively alarming in 2023.

While all these issues have marked the past year in higher education, the greatest debate in 2023 has been around the role of artificial intelligence in education across the globe. In Pakistan, this debate will remain relevant in the near future, even if policymakers in the public sector still seem more interested in denouncing the AI rather than discussing the possibilities it offers for the future.

AI has changed university classrooms. This has not been an isolated phenomenon. The composition of the classroom has changed with a greater challenge coming from students demanding empathy and understanding. Thus, when the presence of AI is added to the many resources available to the Pakistani student who falls in the 16-26 age bracket (starting with high school and going on to an average age for MPhil scholars who re-enter the university after their BS degrees), the transformation scares university faculty and administrators, who have for too long been comfortably limited to the conventional role of a ‘teacher’ delivering a lecture aimed at the hierarchical dissemination of ‘knowledge’ and an abstract notion of the moral training of students.

Technology can bring a revolution in reforming the education sector. AI offers an affordable option for increasing access to educational tools. Rather than resisting it, universities in the public sector need to embrace it and follow the example of private sector universities in Pakistan, and of universities in the rest of the world, where the ethical use of AI is now being debated and promoted. 

AI poses a challenge to the idea of students needing to be told what to think and where to look. It generates for learners whatever they want to look for and has answers that earier technologies did not.

The downsides are obvious; students have found shortcuts to outsource their work to technology, something many did earlier too but now they do not have to pay for it. AI has taken away their need to think. This, however, is true only of students who will cheat in any examination system, regardless of what is at stake.

Experiments have shown that it is hard to detect if a text has been generated by AI or by humans. The conception of authorship is being challenged and writers and researchers fear that their work can now be replicated by a chatbot. “The author is dead” has assumed a new dimension and many fear that the ‘human’ as a category is being replaced by the ‘non-human.’

These concerns about cheating, plagiarism, royalty and intellectual proprietorship are obviously valid, and policymakers will have to address them.

On the other end, AI offers academia a chance to supercharge productivity and find solutions, not shortcuts, to a lot of the manual, unpaid labour that we have to perform which, in real terms, is an impediment to productivity. Making course outlines, setting examination papers, creating assignment instructions, organising research papers, making bibliographies are all examples of tasks that can be improved with with AI assistance. At the heart of it, most old-fashioned academics fail to recognise that using AI is like using Google and other applications for assistance in work. That is not cheating. Academics, faculty and students alike can use technology — as we already do — for assistance and ease, not for cheating.

Of course, a majority of students, especially in the public sector, tend to find shortcuts to escape work but that is more of a reflection of the fragmented and corrupt social fabric and the failure of university education in Pakistan’s public sector to remain relevant and interesting. It is our classrooms that are boring the student into finding shortcuts. Simply making visually interesting presentations does not pique our students’ interest. They need an education that addresses contemporary issues and which they can see translating into success. Teaching outdated curricula without any inspiration has become irrelevant for a generation that is increasingly aware of the surroundings due to access to social media platforms.

In a country where resources are stretched and financial crises seem to remain a constant, education almost never becomes a political priority except when it can be used for further indoctrination of the youth. That was especially true in 2023 and will perhaps become more pronounced over the next few years.

Technology can bring about a revolution in reforming the education sector. AI offers a comparatively affordable option for increasing access to educational tools. Rather than resisting it, universities in the public sector need to embrace it and follow the example of private sector universities in Pakistan, and of universities in the rest of the world, where the ethical use of AI is now being debated and promoted. Hiding behind ancient notions will not resolve the crisis. Academics must take the lead in defining the parameters of using AI in ethical and constructive ways. Otherwise, our universities will continue taking steps backwards in time. That is not a favour to faculty, students or to the society at large.

The writer holds a PhD in literature