The future is AI – and education must adapt

by Dylan Seychell

The mission is simple: Prioritise student human growth over certificates and employ AI for holistic development

While education policy and strategy debates continue, students across Malta have already voted with their keyboards, using AI tools to complete assignments, as this technology reshapes the way we learn and process information. 

As an AI lecturer, I integrate these tools to empower students as future leaders and often appeal for further improved access. As a parent of a three-year-old, I want my son to be ready for an AI-driven future that is different from what the current education system contemplated. Malta’s Vision 2050 emphasises the need for an innovative, tech-driven economy and realising it requires immediate educational adaptation.

Solutions exist if we choose to pursue them. To guide this transformation, I propose applying the ‘backpropagation’ algorithm from AI to our educational system itself. Tertiary education must initiate change and not depend on what it is fed from earlier levels of education. The academic bridge to industry needs instead to propagate the mission backwards to secondary and primary education. 

The mission is simple: Prioritise student human growth over certificates, and employ AI for holistic development.

Facilitators of knowledge

Universities evolved around the notion of academics professing doctrines, hence the titles we still use today. AI is upending the idea that academics are a primary source of knowledge. As tertiary educators, we must humbly become facilitators in an AI-powered world. This requires institutions to reform curricula, methodology, and assessment. The focus at this level has to be on one single learning outcome: learning how to learn.

Assessment has to be overhauled, and we have to move away from methods that AI can easily mimic. Imagine students given the space and opportunity to debate AI- generated analyses in class, researching and stress testing their arguments using the same technology. These methods strengthen student adaptability among other skills that the industry needs.

Curricula revisions cannot take years. For example, despite Malta’s thriving AI strategy since 2019, the 2026 A-Level computing syllabus omits AI, which will be included in 2027’s.

Safe space for AI

Just like tertiary students, secondary students are already using AI. Banning or ignoring it drives its use underground, where misuse festers. Instead, we have to empower and train secondary school educators to create a safe space for the senior years of secondary school to use AI. This will have the same transformative effect that calculators brought to Physics, but to every single subject.

We must ease the focus and pressure to cram knowledge and instead shift towards skills that AI cannot replicate. Applied projects, debates, sports and art spark joyful learning and dialogue which empower young people to own their exploration of knowledge to foster confidence in inquiry.

Nurture human foundations

Primary school is the least impacted by Generative AI due to the importance of foundational skills such as reading, writing and mathematics.  AI amplifies human input; therefore, we have a responsibility to cultivate what makes us human: empathy, decision-making, communication and overcoming setbacks.  These can all be delivered through physical activity, games and awareness of an ‘information diet’. At this level, AI is a powerful tool for educators, not for students. 

There is an opportunity to transform, for example, history lessons to teach students the importance of weighing choices and valuing diverse perspectives. Generative AI makes it easy to integrate games and activities, while also potentially introducing new languages by combining subjects. The Ministry of Education’s recent efforts to educate our children on information literacy are a strong start and should serve as a step to encourage decision-makers to implement change with confidence.

Call to action

Maltese educators at every level are invested and are not complacent, as I have witnessed meeting and training hundreds. The challenge is not willingness but the direction to channel all this positive energy in education towards a single, human-centric transformation in a new world where humans are not the primary source of knowledge.

AI is reshaping the world and our local challenges mirror those of any other educational system in the world. Our agility to address this will define Malta’s global role in the AI-driven future.