The illusion of reform: a new sign on the burning door
From September 1, “Digital Literacy” in grades 1–4 has been renamed “Digital Literacy and Artificial Intelligence,” and “Computer Science” in grades 5–11 has been renamed “Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.” There will be no separate subject: the technology will be built into existing courses. The Education Minister presented this as part of the renewal of school curricula as part of the comprehensive plan until 2029.
Meanwhile, the study has documented a fact that undercuts all this naming work: students often trust AI more than teachers and parents. The algorithm answers instantly, doesn’t judge, won’t give you a bad mark for a stupid question, and is available at three o’clock in the morning. For a teenager, this is the ideal interlocutor - and that is why the ideal interlocutor imperceptibly degenerates from a thinking tool into its replacement.
This is the main story of this school year, and it is not about the names of subjects. There has been a quiet revolution of authority in the Kazakh school. The adult has for centuries held a monopoly on two things: knowledge and appreciation. He lost knowledge back in the era of the search engine. The assessment is lost right now: the machine evaluates the child’s work more gently, faster and without humiliation. The child makes an absolutely rational choice in favor of someone who does not humiliate him.
The trouble is that education has never been built on comfort. It was built on resistance: an adult demands something that you would never demand from yourself. Remove the resistance - what remains is a pleasant service, from which a person will come out who has never in his life experienced an honest “you did something bad.”
And we are deepening this abyss with our own hands. A teacher, faced with the fact “we are now working with AI” without a methodology, without time and without a clear explanation for why, perceives innovation as an unpaid duty. We lock in the same office a teenager for whom a neural network is his native environment, and a teacher who was given it as a punishment. The result is predictable to the point of yawning: the child respects the one who confidently masters the technology. It is not the teacher who controls it confidently.
Renaming an item in such a situation is like hanging a fresh sign on the door of a burning room.
Anatomy of a coup: three things the machine took away from an adult
The first is a monopoly on explanation. Previously, the only person able to explain the theorem was the teacher, and this created a dependence from which respect grew. Today the explanation is available around the clock, in ten difficulty levels, without queues and without a tone of superiority. The teacher is no longer the only door into the subject.
The second is the right to the first reaction. A child faced with a difficult task goes to the one who reacts first. Previously, it was an adult - if he was nearby. Now the adult is not even informed about the existence of the difficulty: it is extinguished in the chat forty seconds before it can become a reason for conversation. We are not losing the role of an explainer, we are losing the very moment of contact from which trust previously grew.
Third is error safety. Here the adult lost completely, and this must be admitted honestly. In our
