‘Teach our children well’: Jack Ma urges changes to China’s education in AI era

Education in China’s countryside should shift away from rote-based learning to focus on nurturing curiosity and creativity in the artificial intelligence era, Alibaba Group Holding founder Jack Ma said in a meeting with rural teachers on Monday. In remarks published by the Jack Ma Foundation on Tuesday, former English teacher Ma said the dawn of the AI era posed a challenge for rural education, but also presented an opportunity to “return to the fundamentals of education”. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. “In the AI era, the question is no longer whether to use AI, but how to teach our children to use AI well,” Ma told teachers in a video conference call. “Education should no longer be about making children compete with AI in calculation and memory. Instead, we should help children maintain their curiosity, as curiosity is the source of ‘computing power’.” That assessment reiterated Ma’s message to rural teachers last year, when he said AI would reshape the world over the next decade. Since 2015, Ma has met annually with 100 new recruits to his foundation’s Rural Teachers Initiative, which identifies promising rural teachers around the country and provides them with financial support and professional training. His latest comments on AI’s impact on rural education came in response to concerns expressed by this year’s recruits that the rural education system would be “left behind” in the AI era, according to the foundation. “The real gap in the AI era is not a technological gap, but rather a gap in curiosity, imagination, creativity, judgment and collaboration,” Ma was quoted by the foundation as saying. “In the AI era, our education system must not aim to have a thousand students give the same correct answer, but rather to teach a thousand students to ask ten thousand different, good questions.” Ma’s comments marked the third time in the past year that he acknowledged the transformative power of AI. In his last public remarks at an Alibaba Cloud event in April, Ma said the responsibility of technologists was not to develop AI systems that replaced humans, but rather to make AI better understand and serve humanity. Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud computing services arm of Hangzhou-based Alibaba. Both the Alibaba Foundation and flagship consumer app Qwen were listed as supporters of the Rural Teachers Initiative. Earlier this month, the Jack Ma Foundation and Qwen donated AI devices, including Alibaba’s new Quark AI glasses, to a rural school in Yibin – a city in southwestern Sichuan province – to promote “AI familiarity” among students, the school said in an announcement. In recent years, Ma has maintained a low profile since stepping down from all his corporate positions at Alibaba, although he remains the company’s single largest shareholder. His latest comments come as other Chinese AI firms have also sounded the alarm on AI’s potential impact on society. On Tuesday, Xinhua News Agency reported that government authorities were preparing a dedicated policy document to address the likely impact of AI on employment. In November, DeepSeek senior researcher Chen Deli warned that AI developers were working towards completely replacing human labour, despite the potentially destabilising effects of such advancement.