Excellence in the Age of AI

Two years ago, we presented the members of the Advisory Council with a new mission the Foundation had taken on: to prepare Israel’s generation of scientific and technological excellence for the age of AI. We did not set out to teach the use of AI tools or to bring them into teaching, but to find out what the scientists and engineers of the future will need to know and understand. We had in mind the broad layer of students eligible for High-Tech Matriculation, now about 15,000 a year, which we aim to expand to about 20,000 a year. The goal is not for all of these students to specialize in AI, but for them to acquire deep, up-to-date foundations that will allow them to lead at the frontier of science and technology. With no agreed curricula and no cadre of teachers, we chose, on the Advisory Council’s advice, to serve as a field-building catalyst. We partnered with “pioneers” from academia, high-tech and education who had experimented with teaching advanced content to excellence students, in the center of the country and in the periphery. A professional community has formed, learning materials have been developed, and an understanding of the knowledge required, and of the conditions for teaching it, has begun to take shape. So far, the work has reached hundreds of students and dozens of teachers.

The pioneering programs have taught us that the deeper one goes into AI, the clearer the importance of foundations in mathematics, statistics, computer science and physics becomes, alongside new and unique content. Two complementary layers are beginning to emerge: advanced specialization in AI for a small group of students, and updated content in the existing subjects for the broad layer of High-Tech Matriculation students. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education has entered the field faster than expected, with a new five-unit track, “AI Science”, offered on top of advanced studies in mathematics, computer science and the sciences, and has also begun to address the broad layer. But the road to updated curricula is still long, and it is not yet clear whether the new track will become a matriculation subject in its own right.

In addition, teaching needs to be prepared. Building teachers’ expertise takes years, but if we prepare them ahead of the change in the curricula, they may have no framework in which to teach the new content. In the meantime, enrichment frameworks, supplementary programs and competitions of various kinds could make advanced learning possible outside school hours as well, until the system can offer it on a broader scale.

This inquiry also connects with the Foundation’s international standards initiative. Both initiatives aim to raise the bar and update the knowledge and skills of the generation of excellence, and both emphasize modeling, thinking under uncertainty, data analysis and reasoning. Two years after we set out, the question is no longer only how to build a new field, but what the next stage is, and how to turn the experience gained into a broad-scale upgrade of the level of content and of teaching capabilities.