LAHORE: The Government of Punjab has taken an in-principle decision to include artificial intelligence as a compulsory subject in government schools across the province, in the most significant change to the public-sector curriculum in years. Separately, the School Education Department has issued a curriculum for teaching social skills to students.
According to officials, the purpose of including a subject on artificial intelligence in government schools is to align students with modern technology, the jobs of the future and the demands of a rapidly changing world.
The government says AI education will give students awareness of the basic concepts of modern technology and its practical applications, while also improving critical thinking and problem-solving abilities.
Officials say the proposed plan will also focus on modernising computer laboratories in government schools and providing the necessary facilities. In addition, arrangements will be made for teacher training to equip educators to deliver artificial intelligence instruction.
The provincial position was reinforced during the chief minister’s visit to China, where Punjab Education Minister Ali Mustafa Dar told a meeting with Alibaba Cloud executives that AI education has been made compulsory in the province from Grade One.
In a parallel reform, a decision has been taken to teach social skills to students in government schools across Punjab, with the School Education Department issuing the accompanying curriculum.
According to the department, dedicated periods and practical activities will be held in schools to train students in social competencies. Their objective is to promote discipline, responsibility and positive social behaviour among students.
The provincial education minister said education is no longer confined to books, and that positive habits and social skills will play an important role in making students responsible, principled and better citizens of tomorrow.
Both reforms are defensible on their merits. The question is capacity, and it is a serious one.
Punjab’s government school system runs to roughly 48,000 institutions. A compulsory subject in every one of them requires, at minimum: a written syllabus and textbooks, a trained teacher in each school, functioning hardware, and electricity to run it. Punjab’s own school census data has historically recorded thousands of schools without a reliable power connection, and functioning computer laboratories concentrated overwhelmingly in urban and higher-secondary institutions.
The teacher-training component is the binding constraint. There is no existing cadre of AI instructors in the public school system; the subject will in practice be taught by computer-science teachers, general-science teachers, or in many rural schools by whoever is available. Whether “AI education” then means genuine instruction in how machine-learning systems work, or a rebranded computer-literacy period, will be determined entirely by the quality and reach of that training programme — and by whether it is funded as a recurring line rather than a one-off cascade workshop.
There is also a sequencing point worth raising honestly. Punjab’s foundational learning outcomes — the proportion of Grade Five students able to read a Grade Two text or perform two-digit division — remain weak by the province’s own assessment data. Introducing AI does not conflict with fixing that, but it competes for the same teacher time, the same school day and the same budget.
The social-skills curriculum is the less-noticed of the two announcements and possibly the more achievable. It requires no hardware, no electricity and no specialist cadre. If it is implemented with genuine activity-based teaching rather than as a memorised chapter, it addresses something Pakistani classrooms measurably lack.
The Lahore Times will seek the notified syllabus documents, the teacher-training budget line and the school-readiness survey for both reforms, and will report what they show.
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