In Pakistan, debates about education tend to orbit around crumbling school buildings, lack of funds, outdated curricula, and an exam system that rewards memory over meaning. Beneath these familiar criticisms lies a deeper and more defining struggle that Dr Shahid Siddiqui confronts in his recent book, “Reimagining Education in Pakistan.”
The book presents nine insightful themes, and we have selected for review the one that reflects on the country’s unresolved relationship with language. It is a relationship that has shaped not only the classroom but also the very architecture of power, identity, and opportunity.
For decades, Pakistan has wrestled with a paradox of its own creation. Urdu, elevated at independence as a symbol of unity, was the mother tongue of only a tiny minority. English, the language of former colonial rule, quietly ascended as the key to bureaucracy, business, and social mobility. Meanwhile, the mother tongues spoken by most Pakistanis, including Balochi, Balti, Pashto, Punjabi, Sindhi, among others, were quietly restricted to private life, unrecognised in the nation’s educational imagination. What we know, and what Dr Shahid has rightfully documented, is a pedagogical dilemma.
Children who come from homes where English is spoken, or at least encouraged, enter elite schools already equipped with what Pierre Bourdieu famously called “linguistic capital.” Those who enter government schools encounter a system that teaches in languages unlikely to unlock upward mobility. The result is not simply inequality but a quiet, relentless form of “educational apartheid,” where language becomes the gatekeeper of privilege and poverty alike.
If Pakistan is to educate its children for the century they are living in, it must build an educational landscape where every language, such as English, Urdu, and the mother tongues, converges in a meaningful, coherent whole.
Dr Shahid argues that English is not only a medium of instruction but also a gateway to higher education and professional success. Meanwhile, regional languages, despite their rich oral and literary traditions, are often treated as cultural curiosities rather than cognitive resources. Urdu, he suggests, functions as a pedagogical bridge between regional languages and English. However, independent research is needed to examine Urdu’s scholastic role for regional language speakers and to determine whether it facilitates or hinders their learning process.
This tragedy is not only educational but also deeply social and emotional. Punjabi, once spoken by more than half of Pakistan’s population, is now steadily declining. Many parents no longer pass on their mother tongue, leaving children detached from the language of their grandparents and the wisdom carried in their stories. The loss is intimate, generational, and irreversible. Dr Shahid captures this erosion with quiet urgency, arguing that when a language disappears, a worldview vanishes with it, along with identity, memory, and meaning.
For all its insight, the book’s argument feels incomplete, not because its critique is weak but because the world around it has changed faster than the frameworks it employs. The analysis is grounded in history and sociology, but it pays limited attention to the technological revolution now reshaping how young people read, write, and communicate.
Generative AI is already embedded in the linguistic lives of millions. A country that has long struggled with English proficiency cannot ignore a technology that can translate, summarise, explain, and scaffold learning across languages in real time.
What Dr Shahid describes as a linguistic hierarchy fortified over decades is being chipped away by tools that allow a student in Bahawalnagar or Swat to translate a biology chapter into Punjabi or Pashto, ask a follow-up question in Urdu, and draft an English summary with Generative AI assistance. For the first time, technology makes it possible to imagine a Pakistan in which access to knowledge is not predetermined by a single language. It has become timely to explore how Pakistan can address linguistic inequality without engaging with the tools already reshaping global communication.
The book needs to explore the new demands the 21st century imposes on language learning itself. In a world where communication increasingly includes multimodal, digital, and Generative AI-assisted interaction, the old binary of English-medium versus Urdu-medium has become outdated. The question is no longer which single language should dominate, but how multiple languages, including local, national, and global, can work together, supported by intelligent systems that adapt to learners rather than forcing learners to adapt to rigid systems.
Addressing these missing elements requires a broader shift in Pakistan’s educational thinking. The country needs a vision of language that neither romanticises tradition nor worships modernity, but integrates the best of both. Generative AI should be positioned not as a threat to learning but as a tool of linguistic justice. It can democratize access by translating textbooks and producing children’s literature in local languages. It can preserve oral histories and develop culturally grounded teaching materials for languages that currently lack resources. While doing so, Generative AI provides every child a bridge to the global conversation.
Pakistan must also recognise that forging a multilingual future is not a burden but an opportunity. Countries across the world nurture multilingual citizens who think, dream, and innovate across languages. Pakistan, too, can build a digital ecosystem in which English remains a global gateway, Urdu a shared national thread, and regional languages a cognitive foundation. AI-assisted translanguaging can help develop such a system, while ensuring that children no longer have to abandon the language of their home to succeed in the world outside it.
Dr Shahid’s book is brave, incisive, and timely. It exposes the historical injustices that continue to shape Pakistan’s classrooms and identifies the inequities that language has quietly entrenched. But as the country stands on the threshold of an unprecedented technological shift, the next step demands a confrontation with the future he gestures toward but needs to enter fully.
Reimagining education in Pakistan now requires reimagining language itself, not as a relic of identity politics, but as a dynamic, adaptive resource shaped by human creativity and machine intelligence alike.
If Pakistan is to educate its children for the century they are living in, it must build an educational landscape where every language, such as English, Urdu, and the mother tongues, converges in a meaningful, coherent whole. That vision may finally allow the country to step out of its linguistic shadows and progress towards a future where opportunity is not inherited but created.
The first author is a Professor of English at Riphah International University, Lahore. He is a lead guest editor at Emerald and Springer publishing.
The second author is an Assistant Professor of English at Govt. Graduate College for Women, Samanabad, Lahore