By Susana Tomaz – Futures Education & AI Lead, Westlake Girls High School, International Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (UNESCO) Fellow, Global Mentor on AI in Education for Asia Europe Foundation, Developer of Open Education Resource
“In the age of AI, the question is no longer if we will use these tools in education, but how and to what end.”
Over the past year, the conversation about AI in education has shifted from hype and fear to a deeper recognition that purpose must lead. The promise of transformation sits alongside real risks: cognitive shortcutting, shallow thinking, and students turning to AI as a substitute for real relationships and authentic human connection. This moment demands that we re-centre purposeful pedagogy, grounded in what makes us human and the values that shape capable, critically minded young people. Education systems need an “intelligence framework” where AI is used to better understand how we think and learn, and to value human intelligence and human capital.
For nearly 200 years, schooling has focused on the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy: remembering, understanding, applying. These remain essential, but in an AI-rich world they are no longer enough. AI can now perform many of these tasks faster and at scale. If education stays anchored here, students will always trail behind machines.
We need to lean deliberately into the upper levels: analysing, evaluating, creating.
Research on generative AI shows that students often start with an AI-generated draft or idea, then loop through evaluating, refining, and re-creating as they build understanding. This effectively flips Bloom’s Taxonomy: in an AI-rich world, the real work of learning sits in critique, judgement, reflection, and sense-making, not in memorising and reproducing content.
Increasingly, learning begins with a prototype, sometimes AI-assisted, and then moves into analysis and refinement. The true foundations are becoming criticality, curiosity, ethical reasoning, and metacognition.
Education for Human Flourishing
The shift from lower- to higher-order thinking in an AI-rich world aligns with the broader movement toward Education for Human Flourishing. Education is no longer just about teaching students something, but about helping them develop a reliable compass. Success is about curiosity that opens minds, compassion that opens hearts, and courage that mobilises cognitive, social, and emotional resources to act.
In the age of AI, education must strengthen human agency, human meaning, and human security.
Aotearoa’s Knowledge-Rich Curriculum as a Foundation for Deeper Capability
The release of Aotearoa New Zealand’s draft learning areas for Years 0–10 is an important step. The commitment to a knowledge-rich curriculum offers clearer progressions and stronger disciplinary coherence, and it provides a solid base for deeper capability building.
However, a knowledge-rich curriculum on its own is not enough for an AI-shaped future. To genuinely prepare learners, disciplinary knowledge needs to sit alongside regular opportunities to analyse, critique, connect, and create in ways that support the wellbeing of people and the planet. Learning is strengthened when it is culturally grounded, relational, and it must reflect Aotearoa’s context. As AI and data literacy are integrated across learning areas, there is also an opportunity to build awareness of Māori data sovereignty. Day of AI Aotearoa is one practical way we are beginning to explore this space in classrooms across the country.
There is also a strategic opportunity to harness AI tools to support the implementation of this curriculum shift itself. With clear governance and teacher oversight, AI can assist schools to undertake gap analysis, review existing resources for alignment and cognitive depth, and accelerate the development of adapted teaching materials. In this way, AI becomes an enabler of coherent implementation, strengthening consistency while keeping professional judgement and pedagogy firmly at the centre.
When knowledge is combined with critique, ethics, and action, it becomes dynamic, something students work with, not just learn about. A knowledge-rich curriculum gives us the “what”; deeper capabilities, AI literacy, and ethical reasoning shape the “how” and “why”. All of this depends on a strong baseline of AI literacy.
Consultation on the draft Years 0–10 curriculum content is open until 24 April 2026
Day of AI Aotearoa: From Pilot to National Rollout
Day of AI Aotearoa is one practical way we are starting to build this baseline. It is a free, curriculum-aligned programme for Years 5–10, thoughtfully adapted for our New Zealand context with culturally responsive pedagogy. The Term 4 pilot, running across ten schools and independently evaluated by NZCER, has shown high student engagement, strong teacher confidence, and a model that is realistic to deliver.
Our goal is that by Term 1 2026, every school, every teacher, and every learner in Aotearoa will have access to free, high-quality AI literacy grounded in our own stories, values, and communities.
This work is made possible through collaboration with MIT RAISE and the global Day of AI team, in partnership with Day of AI Australia, and with the support of Technology Education New Zealand (TENZ), the Education Partnership & Innovation Trust (EPIT), and NZCER.
To support the rollout or for more information about Day of AI Aotearoa, please contact: dayofainewzealand@gmail.com
References
Gonsalves, C. (2024). Generative AI’s impact on critical thinking: Revisiting Bloom’s Taxonomy. Journal of Marketing Education, 1–16.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2025). Education for human flourishing: A conceptual framework. OECD.
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (2025). AI and the future of education: Disruptions, dilemmas and directions. UNESCO Publishing.