Why South Africa needs an AI policy for schools
Artificial intelligence has rapidly emerged as a pervasive technology that those entering the workplace need to have an understanding of. Increasingly, organisations are prioritising the use of AI-powered solutions and platforms, and their employees must now have AI skills to match.
This has resulted in the South African government making AI skills development a local imperative, but what about the country’s focus of coding, robotics, and 4IR-related skills that were the prioritised for the past decade?
This is the question posed by Celeste Labuschagne, a PhD candidate and Lecturer and Learning Framework Developer at Belgium Campus iTversity.
Labuschange posited whether the South African government is making a mistake when it comes to emphasising the importance of AI skills locally, without having a fully fledged framework or plan in place.
“Without direction from the Department of Basic Education, teachers are experimenting with AI tools on their own because learners are already using them at home, and pretending otherwise is not a strategy. Without a shared framework, the outcome will be uneven – some learners receiving structured exposure, others receiving none, with no curriculum designed to build progressively from one year to the next,” Labuschagne pointed out.
“AI literacy cannot be introduced through a once-off lesson or isolated workshop. Like mathematics or language, it needs to develop over time, with foundational skills built grade by grade. Teachers also need training to help learners use these tools in ways that strengthen thinking rather than simply outsource it,” she continued in an opinion piece shared with Hypertext.
AI skills needed for educators and learners
Here, Labuschagne highlighted that while there is a desire to empower educators to take on new technologies and assist learners in getting familiar with them, there is an issue of putting the cart before the horse.
“My concern is that we are slipping into a familiar pattern. The DBE spent years building momentum around Fourth Industrial Revolution skills such as coding, robotics, future-readiness. Curriculum pilots were launched, timelines announced, and educators, myself included, invested considerable time writing manuals and preparing classroom material,” the Lecturer warned.
As it currently stands, educators are playing catch up with no idea of what the end destination is. Without a clear directive in terms of how AI skills should be imparted and fostered, the entire education system has no clear way of reaching the objectives that government has prioritised.
“Since AI cannot be policed, just like Google cannot, learners need to be taught how to interact with and integrate these tools critically and honestly. Without that, we are doing our children a disservice. They will enter a world where AI is embedded in everyday systems, processes and decision-making, without the building blocks to navigate it,” Labuschagne emphasised.
By this year, attackers were using AI to scale and accelerate cyber crime, which extends from generating code and automating attacks, to crafting convincing phishing and deepfake scams. The AI Incident Database lists more than 7 000 incidents in which AI was used as a hacking tool.