It is an onerous responsibility to groom and educate the digital natives of Generation Z and Generation Alpha brought up in a digital age of the post-truth world known for ideological iconoclasm and AI-driven social media narratives. Our young generation following the rest of the world’s grooming models has been overprotected in the real world, and under-protected in the virtual world of social media platforms, which at the same time inform as well as confuse the young and impressionable minds. According to American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt the seeds of American political dysfunction and polarisation were planted in the three harmful ideas in the US universities i.e “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people”.
The above ideas set the stage for a lack of empathy, social conflict, and hedonism that made our young generation especially Generation Z, psychologically fragile and socially insular. The concomitant decline in our schooling standards and the disproportionate accent on grades at the cost of wholesome personality development through sports and co-curricular activities have made the job of university faculties and administration more difficult in grooming and educating the young cohorts joining the universities.
Universities, the world over. are dealing with the new challenges of knowledge and technology proliferation at breakneck speed, in a milieu defined by the writers like Fareed Zakaria as the “Age of Revolutions”. It is an age when old verities and certitudes are being challenged and as a result, the fears and confusion are encouraging people to seek refuge in old and primitive identities and ideologies. The rise of populism and right-wing fascism in the American continent and Europe attest to the new socio-economic realities and the concomitant political upheavals.
The inimitable poetry of Willam Butler Yeats sums up the current world environment where the AI revolution is threatening to impose a Tyranny of Algorithms on human thought and agency:-
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
The challenge of this age is to harness and channelise that passionate intensity in Gen Z and X in a positive direction. In the rudderless knowledge world of tomorrow our intellectual and moral anchor, without doubt, would be our religious precepts and the eternal truth that has so far acted as a moral leaven to bind the disparate thoughts and schisms into a moral unity for the Muslim world. Weaning the young generation away from the pernicious influence of what Kissinger called the “intensity of the emotion wedded to the immediacy of the moment and resulting polarisation” in his book, “Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy.”
Our young generation is frustrated and angry for a host of reasons, including lack of merit, joblessness, the rising cost of living, and the constant political instability. We have to accept those realities before offering nostrums and placebos, which could serve little purpose in this information-rich era.
According to Kissinger, the internet-enabled digital world of news has increased the availability of information and the visually aided emotive appeal to a level that the human brain has lost the capacity to remember and digest the facts, losing thereby the ability to deep introspection and proper analysis. In this age of information surfeit, the ability to sift lies from the facts has deteriorated, promoting groupthink and social polarisation. This all is happening at a time when the forces inimical to the country have pulled all stops to let loose a barrage of disinformation to confuse and divide the nation.
There is a need to understand the value of moral probity and intellectual integrity, which we need to invest our new generation with, in order to make them impervious to the divisive influence of propaganda and disinformation. Our young generation is frustrated and angry for a host of reasons, including lack of merit, joblessness, the rising cost of living, and the constant political instability. We have to accept those realities before offering nostrums and placebos, which could serve little purpose in this information-rich era.
What the new generation needs is hope grounded in reality, in the shape of tangible options and life cum career choices, rather than saccharine homilies. It’s a tall order and no institution can do that alone. The educationists need to craft a co-curricular regimen for educational institutions that develops qualities like tolerance, empathy, integrity, and patriotism in our young university graduates. The battle of narratives could only be won through stronger ideas and better-educated minds: minds that are not at the mercy of demagogues and populists who could sway the impressionable minds through the intensity of emotion and immediacy of the information.
The above is achievable by sedulous cultivation of the intellect through the exposure of the students to high-quality faculty, diverse knowledge resources, and an unbiased interpretation of the religion. The spirit of inquiry and critical debates needs to be fostered through reenergising the debating societies, literary forums, and thought fests. Lastly, the dying tradition of sports needs to be reinvigorated reminiscent of Pakistan’s sports glory era in the sixties and seventies.
The grooming and education of our young generation is a collective responsibility of society and it is in that spirit that we all must make a common cause to direct our energies and resources to achieve that noble objective of grooming our future generations, especially Generation X, as psychologically robust, socially empathetic, and intellectually resilient lot capable of handling with ease the welter of political, social, and technological changes being brought by the “Age of Revolutions”.