The Amazing Generation
On my way to the airport, leaving Boston at the end of this summer, I passed the Kennedy School and remembered a photograph Cecil Stoughton took in the summer of 1963. President John F. Kennedy is aboard the presidential yacht, Honey Fitz, off Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, savoring an ice cream cone as though history had granted him a few minutes outside it. The sun has caught his cheeks, the sea is behind him, and the young president is absorbed in an ordinary, almost wondrous moment, while his country and the world are crossing into another age.
Two years earlier, Kennedy had declared that “the torch has been passed to a new generation,” and posed the question that outlived his presidency: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” That generation faced two seemingly opposite demands: the draft, which reminded it that the nation might ask for its body; and the moonshot, which told it that the nation might ask the impossible of its imagination.
I thought of our children.
They have lived through a rebirth of time: before Covid and after it. They were educated before artificial intelligence and will work after it. The smartphone has altered their relationship with themselves, with school, friendship and knowledge, perhaps even with society itself. In a wisdom traditionally attributed to Ali ibn Abi Talib: “Do not constrain your children to your ways, for they were created for a time other than your own.”
Their time has arrived.
In their new book for younger readers, The Amazing Generation, Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price speak directly to this generation, inviting them to reclaim childhood and freedom from the screen. It is a beautiful beginning. But what happens when a young person looks up from the screen? How does recovering oneself become discovering one’s society; how does freedom become citizenship and responsibility?
What, then, is this generation’s moonshot? And what is its service?
Saudi Arabia is right to bring artificial intelligence into the education of its children. But our ambition should not merely be to produce the best generation at AI. It should be for the coming Saudi generation to stand among the best generations of the AI age.
That requires more than knowledge.
The wars around us may force us to think about preparedness, but the preparedness we need extends far beyond war: a more capable person, a more cohesive society, and a country that knows how to keep functioning when the test comes. The Makkah Joint Defence Agreement has only made that question more urgent.
For too long, our region has resembled a centrifuge: ideological conflicts, proxy wars and subnational identities pulling its people away from one another. Perhaps what we now need is a new centre of gravity.
And at the centre is service.
We should therefore consider a year of national service for every young Saudi man and woman: a year of preparedness and citizenship, bringing young people from different regions and different experiences into a shared responsibility. Its paths could be military, civil, technological, industrial and humanitarian, culminating in a form of service uniquely our own: serving the Two Holy Mosques and the pilgrims who come to them.
A year from which the individual emerges more capable and society more cohesive; knowing technology and machines, knowing the people of one’s country, knowing oneself—and understanding that preparedness is not waiting for danger, but possessing the capacity to work with others when one’s country has need of you.
Nor do we need to borrow the meaning of service from elsewhere. At the head of our state stands its most beautiful expression: the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. If service is an honour of sovereignty, should it not also be an honour of citizenship?
Every mother and father among us has a son or daughter who will one day turn eighteen. We have claims upon them, and they upon us. We should be able to imagine their future with them and ask what it means to build the individual for a time that is not our own: not merely to be reassured by their education, but to be reassured about them—and, through them, about the future of their country.
The Amazing Generation is not merely the generation that reclaims its life from the screen, nor the generation that becomes best at AI. It is an optimistic generation that knows how to aspire, how to produce, how to prepare—and then asks: What can I do for my country?
May God preserve them in the age that is theirs, give them the strength to meet it, and grant us, through them, confidence in the future of their country.
Discipline begins in Atturaif…
and is tested in the world.
Prof. Dr. Malik Ãl-Dahlan
Professor of Law and specialist in international law; International Mediator.
Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews;
Emeritus Professor of International Law and Public Policy, Queen Mary University of London, and;
Member, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.