Sadia Khan
IN the middle of immediate political and economic crises, Pakistan’s leadership remains oblivious to a looming existential challenge that is to prepare Generation Alpha and Generation Beta for a rapidly transforming world. Developing nations, perpetually trapped in short-term survival cycles, face a severe structural disadvantage. Pakistan, ranking poorly on human development indices in South Asia, is a stark example of this systemic failure. Ongoing internal friction keeps both the state and its citizens entirely occupied, forcing a collective ignorance of the future. After all, as the ancient proverb reminds us, a hungry stomach has no ears.
This collective blindness directly collides with the reality that Generations Alpha and Beta are fundamentally distinct from their predecessors, inheriting an unprecedentedly volatile technological landscape. While Millennials transitioned from desktops to laptops and Gen Z grew up alongside the internet, Alpha was born with tablets and Beta is being raised by Artificial Intelligence. In Beta’s world, AI will dictate medicine, law, education and global communication. The World Economic Forum and major global consultancy frameworks project that a massive percentage of current workforce tasks will be automated or structurally altered within the decade. This rapid evolutionary shift demands a radical overhaul of our educational and social structures.
The urgency for this overhaul underscores the tragic fact that our existing public systems are still built for a bygone industrial era. They are designed to mass-produce submissive force: individuals trained to follow rigid scripts, ask no questions, memorize static data and value predictability. Yet, the future marketplace offers no stability; it rewards only flexibility and cognitive speed. Survival will require advanced soft skills such as critical thinking, emotional intelligence, data literacy and rapid adaptability. It necessitates the cultivation of skills that AI will entirely lack.
This deep systemic mismatch raises the question: Is Pakistan prepared for this seismic shift? Let us face the grim reality. The country’s administrative core lags so drastically that even the public service commissions still rely on physical postal mail to dispatch critical official notifications. Financially, the crisis is further exacerbated by combined federal and provincial spending on education stagnating at a meager 0.8% of GDP. Furthermore, a crippling education emergency leaves over 26 million children completely out of school. While buzzwords like “AI” and “Robotics” have recently been forced into textbook curriculums, they exist strictly on paper. Students lack the problem-solving environments to understand how or where to apply these digital tools. Meanwhile, academia and society continue to push the youth toward a desperate, outdated hunt for career stability.
To bridge this chasm, our institutional goals must pivot toward training them for dynamic adaptability. Instead of memorizing answers to pass exams.Our youth must learn to dissect problems and question assumptions. Rather than blindly following instructions, they must be incentivized to build original solutions. If we do not fundamentally shift our focus from rote survival to proactive innovation, Generation Beta will stand no chance of surviving in the modern world.
—The writer is contributing columnist, based in Rawalpindi.
