CONVENTIONAL university education is obsolete. The typical student earning a Bachelor’s degree studies the equivalent of roughly 40 textbooks over eight semesters. Today, however, any intelligent teenager with access to ChatGPT — trained on millions of books and articles — can surpass that graduate in a contest of factual knowledge. Attempting to ban such tools misses the point. The real challenge is not the technology itself, but the outdated model of education it exposes. We need to rethink education from the ground up.
The two world wars reshaped modern society in profound ways. Science and technology proved decisive in determining the outcomes of these conflicts, and as a result, technical expertise became central to education in the post-war era. Harvard educator Julie Reuben documents this transformation in her book The Making of the Modern University, showing how universities shifted from emphasising character formation to prioritising scientific and technical knowledge. Objective knowledge increasingly displaced the subjective human experiences that had once been central to education.
Paradoxically, the scientific model of education universities embraced has produced artificial intelligence systems that command far more knowledge than any human could acquire in four — or even 40 — years of study. Instead of mourning the jobs AI is already displacing, we should recognise the extraordinary opportunities it creates — provided we redesign education to cultivate the uniquely human capabilities of our students. Knowledge is now plentiful and easily accessible, but courage, integrity, vision, and leadership — once central to education — remain beyond the reach of AI. Just as nuclear technology can generate power, AI can generate enormous social benefits — if we redesign education for the age of AI.
Modern education resembles a driving school that teaches students everything about the mechanics of a car — the engine, the transmission, the chemistry of fuel — but never actually teaches them how to drive. Students learn theories about the world while their own lived experience is pushed to the margins. Yet the most important questions we face are not merely technical ones about how the world works, but practical ones about how to live. Just as driving requires judgement, attention, and practice rather than abstract knowledge alone, education must once again take seriously the cultivation of real-world skills and the development of the capacities required to navigate life itself.
Today, the task of education is to cultivate human beings.
If education must teach us how to navigate life rather than merely analyse the world, then it needs to be re-engineered to confront the most important question we face as human beings: how to make the best use of the precious, limited time we are granted in life. Because each of us is unique, there can be no single answer. Yet a good education should open a window onto the millennia-long human conversation about this question.
We witness it so often that we forget the miracle: a tiny seed, given the right soil and care, grows into a towering tree. Education should work in much the same way. Its task is not merely to transmit information, but to cultivate the distinctive potential within each student — allowing them to pursue excellence in all dimensions of their lives.
Education must therefore cultivate the human capacities that no machine can replicate. It should help students learn how to build meaningful relationships, resolve conflicts, and work with others towards shared goals. It should nu-rture judgement, responsibility, and integrity in the face of difficult choices. And it should prepare young people not only to succeed individually, but also to strengthen the communities and nations to which they belong — bridging divisions, fostering trust and working towards a shared future.
In an age when machines can store and retrieve more knowledge than any human mind, the old model of education has become obsolete. Universities were designed to produce human resources for an industrial age when knowledge was scarce. Today, the real task of education is far deeper: to cultivate human beings — individuals capable of judgement, responsibility, relationships and leadership in a complex world. Machines may now hold massive amounts of knowledge. Nelson Mandela’s choice of reconciliation over revenge after apartheid showed that wisdom — not information — ultimately determines the fate of nations. Education today must impart the wisdom human beings need to shape our lives and our societies.
The writer is a professor at Akhuwat Institute, Kasur.
Published in Dawn, March 18th, 2026