SCHOOLING has changed a lot over the last three decades. Teachers engage students more; the curriculum is constantly updated; books and teaching material are more interesting and even interactive; new ways of teaching and engaging students have been introduced; technology has made its way into education in a big way; corporal punishment is officially banned and frowned upon if still practised; it is widely accepted that children need to learn through doing and exploring rather than just listening to lectures; and last but not least, it is recognised that learning should not be a drudgery and should be enjoyable. There is no reason why learning cannot be enjoyable.
Bigger changes from outside have also had impacts. Online content has made access to quality material easier for teachers, parents and students. Online teaching and learning is opening new doors to ways of how children can be educated. It also improves access to subjects and areas that might not be available locally. Students can now participate in international competitions and other interactions from their schools or homes. AI has only just begun to have an impact. It is hard to see where it will take us but it will have a significant impact in multiple educational domains. Social media has changed access issues, and is shaping the brains, minds and habits of children for good and for bad. The impact is already significant and will be more so over the next decade.
When I talk to children, teenagers and young adults, it is clear that most of them enjoy school or college more than how much my friends and I enjoyed school. These changes need to be built on. There is no reason why any child should not have an enjoyable and fruitful learning experience. Education and learning are part and parcel of human existence. How does it make sense to not work on making this important part of life enjoyable?
At the same time, I have observed certain things over my 30-year or so teaching career that too need to be given some thought. Social media has been shown to have negative impacts on child development. It is not just trolling and peer pressure that are of concern but also how social media and electronic gadgets tend to hardwire children’s brains. A few countries have already started limiting access to social media and internet during school hours. Some have even put age limits on when children can access social media. We need to think this through. The technology is having an impact on student concentration, attention spans and even on how children learn.
There is no reason why learning should not be an enjoyable and fruitful experience.
Learning should be enjoyable but it is also the case that hard things require a lot of effort to learn. Memory usage and sharpness, concentration, grit and resilience need hard work to build. In a bid to make learning enjoyable, some schools end up making things too easy. Students are not able to stay with difficult problems for long. They get bored or frustrated far too easily. But there are definitely hard problems we need to tackle and students need to be able to build ‘muscles’ for the hard work needed.
Multiplication and division, introduced around Grade 3 and 4, are hard concepts to understand and work out. I have seen too many teachers only demonstrate the method for doing multiplication and/or long division and then just relying on examples and exercises to get students reasonably comfortable. There is little to no effort to engage with the concepts behind them. More importantly, there is little attempt to work on memory, grit, concentration, resilience and other desirable attributes when working on explaining the concepts.
Learning multiplication tables ‘by heart’ might not be needed anymore as students have access to calculators and computers all the time (though I do feel memorisation gets a bad rap when learning poetry, tables, etc, is excellent practice). But they do need to realise that understanding the basics of multiplication and division are strong ways to further this acquaintance.
I see too many children crying or giving up when they face questions they do not know how to attempt or whose answers they get wrong on the first try. Teachers are not imparting the lesson that failing, making mistakes and learning from them is part of the process and that it is essential to engage with difficult problems for longer periods.
I have seen similar struggles in the teaching and learning of languages. Urdu and English can be hard for children to learn, depending on their circumstances. If a child is introduced to a language three to four times a week — for 40 minutes or so each time — it would be a miracle if he/she is able to learn that language well. Learning is slow and deliberate; it requires significant repetition and a lot of attention. If the attempt to turn education into ‘edutainment’ takes away from these, it will be a loss.
Private schools, in my experience, face this pressure more. They need to show parents that their children are enjoying classes and work, are doing well and are (almost) always brilliant. I guess the fear of losing children drives part of the logic. But there is a fine balance between building the confidence of children and just appeasing them. This balance seems to be missing considerably in our K-12 education.
Though we know much more about how children learn effectively than we did 25-30 years ago, we still don’t know enough. Education should be enjoyable and children happy when learning new things. So, the kind of draconian regimes previous generations were educated under are out.
And rightly so. But education is not only about content; it is also about shaping humans and developing qualities like effective memory usage, deep concentration and focus for long periods, grit, resilience, etc. We need children to be able to take on hard tasks and to persist with them. Hopefully, modern trends in education will be able to forge a happy balance.
The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums.
Published in Dawn, January 30th, 2026
