Culture eats AI for breakfast: Pakistan's real education fix

Why education is the bottleneck for the AI shift

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation around a realisation that has been building across his recent episodes. The world is shifting fast, the opportunities coming with AI are real, but Pakistan’s ability to capture any of it depends on something more boring than technology. It depends on whether the country can educate its people for the new world at all. “If we want to fully utilise this shift,” he says, “if we want to maximise its potential, we have to change our education, educate our people, teach them skills, get them ready.”

He brings on Kamil Majeed, CEO and principal of Nordic International School in Lahore — a Swedish school running from playgroup through O-levels, recently nominated in the top ten schools in the world in the category of community collaboration. Kamil is a LUMS accounting and finance graduate who took an unusual route into education through a UN Global Forum and a Commonwealth scholarship to UCL’s Institute of Education, which he describes as the number one programme in the world for education as a subject.

The framing matters because it sets the question Kamil spends the next hour answering: what does education actually need to do for a Pakistani child if the goal is a globally ready, AI-literate adult who can think?

An accidental route into education

Muzamil flags Kamil’s profile as a curiosity — accounting and finance graduates do not usually end up running schools — and Kamil walks through the sequence. He worked at Netsol, ran a consultancy, did an MBA in Turkey, and won a UN Global Competition that took him to New York in 2015. At the UN office, he saw a quote by Malala on the wall: one child, one book, one teacher can change the world. A conversation with the head of the forum over coffee pushed him toward a structured education in education itself.

He read Paulo Freire in his master’s programme and was struck by the line that education does not change the world — education changes people, and people change the world. The personal lesson came later, after he returned to Pakistan and took over the school. “When I joined in,” Kamil tells Muzamil, “I realised that in order to bring about any change, you cannot change the people. You have to change yourself. So, that is what the children made me realise.”

He uses this to draw a line under one of the conversation’s recurring themes. Education in Pakistan, he argues, has become demand-driven — parents ask for a swimming pool, a programme designed around their preferred university, and schools deliver it as a one-stop shop. “It should be supply driven,” he says. “It should be about doing the right thing. It should be about preparing the children for life.”

Curiosity as the prerequisite for AI

Muzamil then asks the question that organises the rest of the episode. In a post-AI world, what defines a future-ready child? Kamil’s answer is a single word: curiosity.

“The one thing that you need in order to interact with AI, in order to make the most of AI, is a skill called curiosity,” he says. The reason is mechanical. AI’s output is bounded by the quality of the prompt — by the user’s ability to set context, define the outcome, describe the audience and tone. Without curiosity, the student does not know what to ask, and the tool collapses into an autocomplete for shallow questions. “AI is your thinking partner at best,” Kamil tells Muzamil. “It’s not an opportunity to outsource your brain.”

What makes the point a structural one, rather than a motivational one, is what Kamil says next about schools. Curiosity has preconditions. The first is a safe environment, free of ego and self-doubt — because if the teacher operates from “I already know everything” and the principal operates from “this is my school,” no learning can happen. The story becomes about the adults, and that incapacitates children to ask questions. The second is inspiration. Pakistani schools, he argues, have built a habit of fixing problems rather than inspiring children, and “when inspiration does not exist, the children cannot aspire to something that does not exist.”

He closes the section with a phrase he returns to twice in the episode: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast, and culture eats AI for breakfast as well.”

What the UK system actually taught him

Muzamil presses Kamil to compare what he received at LUMS with what he received at UCL — and to be honest about whether the difference was real or whether the romance of London inflated it. Kamil’s answer is precise.

The Pakistani structure, he says, is built on rote memorisation and rewards the ability to reproduce. The UK structure rewards the ability to contribute. He describes walking into his first class at UCL and asking the question every Pakistani student asks: what is the grading structure? The answer surprised him. No quizzes, no class participation marks, no final exam. One assignment, graded on how authentically and originally the student added to the existing body of research. “The structure is sending you to the library to come up with research, to understand research, to critically evaluate and come up with something new.”

He recalls his first lesson — a professor opening with the line: what I am going to tell you is my story, I do not want you to agree or disagree, I want you to listen and come up with your own story, and that is what you will be graded on. “I was like, wow, this is fascinating,” Kamil tells Muzamil. “Somebody finally wants to respect my story.”

He layers a second lesson on top. When he tried to tell a senior professor that a particular theory was wrong, the professor stopped him. A theory is not a law, so it cannot be wrong in itself. What can be challenged are the assumptions on which the theory rests. Kamil says he has carried that distinction into every feasibility and projection he has run since.

The cricket trial at Lord’s

The conversation takes a turn that initially looks like a tangent and ends up being one of the most useful passages in the episode. Kamil — who played for Pakistan in the 2004-2005 Under-17 Asia Cup — describes the contrast between playing cricket in Pakistan and being invited to trials for the University of London team at Lord’s.

In Pakistan, he says, players showed up casually, in pyjamas and chappals, an hour late for a 07:30 reporting time. At Lord’s, players had to wear a suit to a match. The manager would not let a player onto the field without one. Five minutes late meant ten laps and fifty push-ups — enough to ruin the match for the player who arrived late. The ground was shared, the team applauded the opposition, and the whole culture treated the game as a gentleman’s game.

Muzamil makes the point Kamil is building toward. These are not things you learn from a curriculum. They are values you absorb from exposure — punctuality, professionalism, the seriousness with which one presents oneself — and in a globalised job market they are what separate, in his phrase, an ordinary person from an extraordinary one. Kamil agrees and extends it. “There is a clear absence of values” in Pakistani professional life, he says. Not turning up on time, not following through on a commitment, not preparing for an opportunity — these read as lack of integrity, lack of honesty, lack of responsibility. And, he argues, this conversation about values has not been part of Pakistani institutions, because values look abstract and the children have never seen them embodied.

Two stories the children gave him

To anchor the values argument, Kamil tells two stories. The first is from his own school. A boy who was part of what he called “a mafia group” of five came to him for a disciplinary conversation. Asked why he was doing this, the child said: because it is cool. Asked what he wanted out of it, the child said: world domination. Kamil offered him a choice — a warning and possible expulsion, or a chance to learn something new. The opening was that the child, he realised, did not know the basic definition of cool, because the society had never trained him to see that kindness could be cool.

The second is from the same school. A teacher noticed that the woman who worked for her lived in an environment buried in rubbish, and decided with her O-level class to do something about it. The students put on gloves and physically cleared the waste. The neighbourhood gathered to watch. When Kamil asked the students how they felt, they said they felt free, liberated, happy. “Isn’t that the purpose of education?” he asks Muzamil. “Isn’t that the role of educators? To provide an environment to the children so that they feel free, so that they’re happy, so eventually they can learn.”

He emphasises that these are not weak students. They are A-star students producing top results. The values work and the academic rigour are not in tension. They are the same project.

AI in the classroom, properly

Muzamil shifts to the technology question directly. There are two narratives competing in public. One says AI can democratise access to world-class education at near-zero cost — he cites Khan Academy translating its content into Urdu using AI, and the broader pattern of personalised tutoring becoming available at a fraction of historical cost. The other says AI is dumbing students down, because they are offloading their agency and their intellect onto the model and showing up as operators who copy and paste answers. Muzamil also references a recent Punjab government announcement about training a thousand AI teachers and bringing AI education into every school — progressive in principle, but in his read, announced before the ground was built.

Kamil cites a Brookings Institution report. Heavy investments in classroom technology, the report finds, show no correlation with improved student or teaching outcomes — unless the teacher is trained to make the technology part of their pedagogical approach. He then lays out the current risk profile honestly. On a de facto basis right now, he says, the disadvantages of AI in schools outweigh the advantages. Two threats stand out. The first is the offloading problem Muzamil raised — students producing low-quality inputs and getting low-quality outputs they cannot evaluate. The second is the erosion of the teacher-student relationship, which Kamil treats as the actual carrier of inspiration and social learning in a school.

His prescription is structural. Implementation has to be a community effort built around what he calls the holy triangle — students, teachers, and parents — trained together on the ethical use of AI, with a deliberate emphasis on integrity and creativity. And the school environment, again, has to be designed to ignite curiosity, because curiosity is the skill that makes a student able to direct AI rather than be directed by it. He closes with a line that lands cleanly: AI is not going to replace the job of the teachers, but it will replace teachers who have not upskilled and have stopped being curious.

What Pakistan looks like in 2050

Muzamil ends with a long question. Kamil studied abroad, played international cricket, has seen the world, and chose to come back. What does he think Pakistan looks like in 2050?

Kamil is careful but optimistic. Sixty percent of Pakistan’s population is youth — an asset, he says, only if it is guided and inspired. If it is not, “it is going to become a curse.” His read is that the country has enormous potential but a recurring failure mode in policy: announcements without implementation, and policy made without involving the practitioners who would have to deliver it. The work is collaboration — bringing practitioners into the policy-making process rather than fighting them — and embodying the values that the next generation is supposed to inherit.

Muzamil closes by stepping out of the interview and back into his own frame. The narrative around education in Pakistan, he says, is weirdly dismissive — as if running an education business is on a par with selling tooth powder. He pushes back on it. The country has a tsunami of young people who need direction, values, exposure, and quality teaching, and the demand vastly exceeds the supply. He is, in his words, “a through and through capitalist” on this point. Build real businesses around it. If they make people rich while doing genuine good, that is halal earning. The country needs a thousand more of them, and it still will not be enough.