Dr. Fiaz Maqbool Fazili
We live in an extraordinary technological age. Artificial intelligence can answer questions within seconds. Robots can perform complex tasks, remote-controlled machines can operate where human presence is dangerous, and digital tools can retrieve information, calculate, translate, summarise, and even generate images and ideas. Knowledge has never been more accessible. Yet within this remarkable convenience lies a profound educational challenge: if machines can increasingly search, calculate, write, create, and assist with decisions, what becomes of the distinctly human capacities that cannot simply be automated – curiosity, imagination, judgement, empathy, originality, and independent thought? Education must do more than teaching children how to use technology. It must ensure that technology does not gradually begin thinking on their behalf.
For earlier generations, finding an answer often required patience and effort. Students visited libraries, searched through books, discussed ideas with teachers, and spent hours wrestling with difficult problems. Today, students can enter a question into a search engine or AI platform and receive an answer almost instantly. This represents a paradigm shift in creativity – from simply accessing instant answers to engaging in deeper thinking, critical reflection, and meaningful problem-solving. This shift has been viewed of having enormous educational potential. Technology can make learning faster, more accessible, and more engaging. AI can explain complex concepts in different ways, support language learning, generate examples, and provide personalised assistance. Yet the same convenience can also foster dependency.
When students grow accustomed to immediate answers, they may lose their willingness to struggle with difficult questions—and that intellectual struggle is often where meaningful learning begins. A challenging problem forces experimentation. An unfamiliar concept encourages investigation. A wrong answer compels us to reconsider our assumptions. Creativity frequently emerges precisely where we do not yet know the answer.If technology removes every obstacle, it may also remove some of the experiences that teach us how to think.
Children’s learning often begins with curiosity, the initial impulse to notice something unfamiliar, puzzling, or interesting. Curiosity sparks wonder that generates questions, questions drive exploration, and exploration leads to deeper understanding. Wonder then develops into questioning, through which they articulate what they want to understand. Questions such as why the sky is blue, why stars shine, why humans cannot breathe underwater, why plants require sunlight, or why people hold different opinions represent this transition from simple curiosity to purposeful exploration. Once a question is formulated, children can investigate possibilities, seek explanations, compare evidence, and revise their understanding. The progression is therefore clear: curiosity generates wonder, wonder prompts questions, questions initiate exploration, and exploration contributes to understanding. Education should support each stage of this process rather than moving immediately to the delivery of predetermined answers. By preserving this progression, educators can create conditions in which curiosity develops into sustained engagement, creativity, and deeper learning. That relentless curiosity is not a distraction; it is the foundation of learning. Unfortunately, as children move through the education system, many become more concerned with producing the correct answer than asking an insightful question.
In examination-oriented classrooms, students may hesitate to express an unconventional idea because they fear being wrong. They may gradually learn that there is one expected answer, one approved method, and one prescribed way to explain a concept. The real world, however, is rarely so straightforward.
Many of life’s most consequential questions have no single answer: How should artificial intelligence be governed? How can climate change be addressed? What constitutes a just society? How much authority should technology have over human decisions? What makes an effective leader?
Such questions demand judgement, imagination, discussion, and critical reasoning. Education should not merely tell students what to think; it should equip them to think critically, independently, and creatively. Examinations have an important place in education: they can assess knowledge, comprehension, and preparation, while the methodology of assessment/examination is debatable beyond scope of this piece. The problem arises when marks become the principal measure of achievement.
In many educational systems, students face immense pressure to perform. Parents worry about results, schools focus on rankings, and students compete for limited opportunities. Learning can consequently become a race for marks rather than a journey of discovery. A student may memorise an entire chapter the night before an examination and reproduce it accurately the next morning. But if the information soon disappears from memory, can we really say that meaningful learning has occurred?
Learning should extend beyond the examination hall by enabling students to connect academic concepts with real-world contexts, critically examine their relevance, and consider their application across diverse situations and perspectives. Such an approach shifts education from the acquisition and reproduction of information toward analytical engagement, contextual application, and reflective understanding, thereby fostering deeper learning and intellectual autonomy. Artificial intelligence is likely to become one of the most influential technologies/tools of our generation. not a substitute for thought. Asking students to fear it serves little purpose. Instead, we must teach them to use it wisely, ethically, and critically.
AI can be an extraordinary learning companion. It can explain difficult concepts, provide examples, organise information, offer alternative perspectives, and support learners with different needs and rates of progress. Yet there is a crucial distinction between using AI to enhance thinking and using it to avoid thinking. If a student asks AI to write every essay, solve every mathematical problem, and complete every assignment, the final product may look impressive while the student’s own intellectual abilities remain undeveloped. The purpose of education is not to produce flawless homework; it is to develop capable, responsible, and intellectually independent human beings. Students should therefore critically evaluate AI-generated responses by assessing their accuracy, evidence, assumptions, and conclusions, while remaining open to alternative explanations. Paradoxically, as AI becomes increasingly capable of generating information, human critical judgment may become more—not less—important.
Machines can assemble products, operate in hazardous environments, support healthcare, and perform repetitive tasks with remarkable precision. Remote-controlled and autonomous systems can also access deep oceans, disaster zones, and other settings where human presence may be unsafe. However, task performance should not be equated with human understanding. While robots can execute instructions, computers can process vast amounts of information, and algorithms can detect patterns and generate predictions, human judgment extends beyond computational functions. Qualities such as compassion, moral responsibility, imagination, intuition, and sensitivity to others’ emotions and circumstances remain central to human experience.
Education must therefore cultivate these distinctly human capacities alongside technological competence, ensuring that technological advancement complements rather than diminishes human development.Creativity flourishes when students are encouraged to explore, experiment, question, and learn from mistakes rather than reproduce predetermined answers. A classroom should value diverse approaches and outcomes. Given the task of designing a machine for natural-disaster response, one student may reproduce an existing design, demonstrating recall and replication, while another may define the problem, explore alternatives, anticipate risks, and develop an original solution, demonstrating problem-solving and innovation. The two approaches therefore produce fundamentally different learning outcomes: one reinforces existing knowledge, while the other generates new understanding and possibilities.
In an age of abundant information, I sense changing role of teachers. They are no longer the primary source of knowledge; they are its critical interpreters. Their deeper role is to challenge assumptions, expose misconceptions, question evidence, and help students distinguish knowledge from misinformation. The most effective teacher is therefore not the one who provides the most answers, but the one who provokes the most meaningful questions. Instead of saying, “This is the answer,” a teacher can ask, “What do you think?” Instead of immediately correcting a mistake, the teacher can ask, “What led you to that conclusion?” Such questions encourage students to examine their own reasoning.
Parents can nurture thinking, shape learning through everyday expectations and responses to success and failure. When parents value curiosity and effort over marks alone, children are more likely to ask questions, attempt unfamiliar tasks, share tentative ideas, and revise their thinking in class. When grades dominate, children may stay silent, avoid difficult questions, fear mistakes, and prioritize correct answers over understanding. Thus, parental expectations help establish the habits and dispositions children bring into the classroom—shaping whether they participate actively, persist through difficulty, and think independently or remain cautious, answer-driven, and risk-averse.
The classroom of the future should be a partnership between humans and technology, not a competition. Students can use technology to research, generate possibilities, and practise skills while developing the judgment to verify information, refine ideas, and engage meaningfully with teachers and peers. Education must therefore prioritize critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, creativity, ethical reasoning, and sound judgment. The goal is not to make students better at using machines, but to ensure they remain capable of questioning machines, challenging their outputs, and deciding when human judgment must prevail.
The world our children inherit will be shaped by rapid technological change, transforming careers, expanding AI capabilities, and unprecedented access to information. In such a world, memorisation alone will not suffice. Students will thrive by learning to adapt, question, create, collaborate, and exercise sound judgment – to face difficult problems with the confidence to ask, “Is there another way?”
Technology and AI are not the real threat; the greater danger is allowing convenience to replace curiosity and judgment. If machines can provide answers instantly, education must help students ask better questions—questions that demand human imagination, empathy, wisdom, and ethical judgment.
Classrooms should therefore be places where curiosity is encouraged, mistakes become opportunities to learn, and unconventional ideas can develop. Students should gain knowledge while learning to question it, use AI without surrendering their judgment, and develop both technical competence and distinctly human capacities.
Education should not merely teach students how to find answers; it should teach them which questions are worth asking. Knowledge helps us navigate the world; the capacity to think, question, and create enables us to change it.
Precisely, the future does not belong to those who possess every answer. It belongs to those who have the courage, curiosity, and creativity to ask better questions.
(The author is a medico and senior columnist focused on education, human potential, and positive perception management in a rapidly changing technological world.)
