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This conversation between Idrees Butt, Founder of The Way Forward, and Yaser Amir Awan, Director of Innovation at the University of Central Punjab, covered entrepreneurship, failure, AI, and the future of Pakistan’s technology sector. But the thread running through all of it was something more fundamental: the way conditioning shapes what people believe is possible for themselves. It is a conversation that sits at the heart of everything wrong with critical thinking education in Pakistan today.
When we talk about conditioning in the context of education in Pakistan, we are not talking about discipline or structure. We are talking about something far more limiting: the gradual narrowing of what a person believes they are capable of thinking, doing, or becoming.
Conditioning starts early. It comes from home, from schools, and from the social environment a child grows up inside. One of Pakistan’s most respected educators experienced the opposite in his own childhood. Read: The Greatest Gift My Father Gave Me Was Freedom. Over years, children learn what to think rather than how to think. They learn that there are right answers and wrong answers, that questioning is risky, and that staying within the expected path is safe.
The real problem is not a child who cannot learn. It is a system that has spent years teaching them not to question.
Pakistan has debated its curriculum for decades. Which board. Which syllabus. Which subjects. These conversations miss the deeper issue. A child can complete twelve years of education with a perfectly structured curriculum and still exit unable to think independently.
This is exactly the outcome that rote learning produces. Read: Why Rote Learning Fails Children.
This is exactly what critical thinking education in Pakistan is missing at scale. Not the concept, which many educators understand well, but the practice, built into every session, every assessment, every interaction between teacher and student.
One of the most useful ideas from the conversation was about how we understand failure. When we refuse to acknowledge what was actually accomplished inside a difficult experience, we rob ourselves of the learning that makes the next attempt stronger.
A child who is penalised for a wrong answer learns to avoid attempting anything uncertain. A child who is helped to understand what their wrong answer revealed learns that mistakes are the mechanism of growth.
The students who will genuinely benefit from AI are those who use it to go further than they could alone: to pressure-test their thinking, explore ideas faster, and build on their own understanding rather than replace it. That requires having developed independent thinking skills in the first place.
AI will replace us eventually. But we are replacing ourselves first by being lazy users of it. The danger is not the technology. It is what we choose to do with it.
The work that most needs doing in Pakistan is not building another product or service. It is breaking the conditioning. For families who have already decided to take a different path, our guide to homeschooling in Pakistan is a practical starting point. The window for reshaping how a person thinks is widest in the middle years of childhood, precisely the years that TWF focuses on.
Societal change does not happen through announcements or grand programs. It happens through cascading impact. One person’s thinking shifts. They touch someone else’s thinking. That is what we are trying to do at TWF. Change what learning feels like for the children in front of us, and trust that those children will carry something different into every room they walk into for the rest of their lives.
