FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, JUNE 18, 2026, VANCOUVER, B.C.—In a recent commencement address at NYU Abu Dhabi, AI expert and former Chief Business Officer of Google X, Mo Gawdat offered a powerful analogy.
Gawdat shared that for previous generations, success was like playing chess. The world rewarded planning, memorization, strategy, and mastering established rules.
Today’s graduates, he argued, are entering an AI-driven world that looks much more like squash: fast-moving, unpredictable, and constantly changing. You cannot plan twenty moves ahead because the game itself keeps changing.
Play chess on a squash court and you will get squashed.
Yet while governments around the world grapple with how AI will reshape education, employment, healthcare, and public services, David Eby and the B.C. NDP’s approach has largely been to leave institutions to figure it out for themselves. The B.C. Government has produced nothing resembling a strategy to deal with the most disruptive technology of our lifetimes.
The result is predictable: school districts are developing their own policies, post-secondary institutions are creating their own guidelines, teachers are experimenting in their classrooms, and parents are trying to understand technologies that seem to evolve by the week.
The Vancouver School Board recently rolled out Microsoft Copilot accounts for students aged 13 and older, and Surrey has approved multiple AI platforms for classroom use. Both districts deserve credit for recognizing that AI literacy matters. But their shared assumption—that because students are already using AI, schools must teach them to use it responsibly—assumes teachers can effectively monitor that use. Anyone who has spent time in a classroom recently knows how unrealistic that is. Adding AI supervision, without changing classroom size and complexity, is not a strategy; it is a recipe for chaos.
The research remains limited, but early findings suggest caution. Researchers are raising concerns about overreliance, reduced critical thinking, weaker retention, and students who give up the moment a problem gets hard. Learning is not simply about producing answers; it is about developing the judgment, understanding, and intellectual resilience needed to evaluate those answers and apply them wisely.
Whenever concerns about AI in education are raised, supporters often compare it to the calculator. The analogy is reassuring but misses a crucial distinction. Calculators automate arithmetic, after students have learned the operations. Generative AI can write essays, formulate arguments, and create presentations before students have developed the skills to do any of it themselves.
A calculator helps students calculate; AI helps students think.
That difference matters because the challenge facing education today is no longer access to information. The challenge is determining which human capabilities remain essential when information, analysis, and even many forms of creative output are available on demand.
The deeper problem is that our education system runs on chess-era assumptions: memorize, recall, follow procedure, produce the answer — exactly what AI now does instantly.
Even leaders building these systems are suggesting a different approach.
Anthropic co-founders Dario and Daniela Amodei have both argued that schools should be teaching the qualities that shape us humans and build character: creativity, adaptability, judgment, human connection, empathy, ethics, and the ability to work effectively with rapidly changing technologies.
So if the research supporting its implementation is limited and AI’s own architects are questioning its full implementation in schools, why are individual school districts making decisions that could fundamentally reshape learning across British Columbia?
Because they have been left to figure it out themselves by a lack of leadership by the B.C. NDP.
A CentreBC provincial AI strategy would at the very least ensure every student graduates AI literate; shift curriculum to emphasize critical thinking, creativity, communication, ethical reasoning, adaptability, and resilience; establish clear standards for responsible AI use in K-12 and post-secondary education; and invest in teacher training to support educators in leading this transformation.
Without a provincial AI framework to guide school districts, they will continue to fend for themselves. And our students may discover too late that they were trained for the wrong game.
CentreBC, June 2026
Rachelle Chartrand is a teacher and Communications Chair for CentreBC.
