Open Minds and AI-generated Assessments

Creeds constrain. Education must foster in every scholar the capacity to take joy in things beyond their understanding and to respond to the uncommon with an open mind. Advanced algorithms now create AI-generated assessments that display heightened ambiguity, complexity, intertextuality, and rigor. AI-generated tests are post-Tyler evaluation tools designed by AI that leverage natural language processing, machine learning, and AI technologies. These systems analyse voluminous educational content, library collections, scholarly discourses, and online databases, to frame problems and propose solution paths, including multiple correct answers.

AI-generated assessment typically involves: (1) Content Analysis to parse and analyse relevant material, (2) Problem Framing based on the analysed content, (3) Answer Validation to ensure the accuracy and relevance of the probable answers by cross-referencing multiple datasets, and (4) Difficulty Calibration that adjusts the difficulty level of the problem frame.

To achieve this transformation, the entrepreneurial state must begin by carefully redesigning the nine ecological frames of schooling. This will involve a careful look at: (I) Governance and the delegation of authority to principals, (II) a post-Tyler pedagogy suitable for the Age of AI, (III) an Education Estate Audit, (IV) formulating a new vision of Education in the Age of AI with a focus on AI-assisted numeracy and literacy projects, (V) AI-generated Assessment toolkits, (VI) Axiology to enable the student to uncover the nature of value, (VII) Quality Assurance and Institutional Effectiveness, (VIII) Curriculum as a Matrix of connections and not a directory, and (IX) an updated Administration, Inspectorate, and Monitoring department.

In the pre-dawn schools of former plantation societies, the Penny Catechisms of Useful Knowledge served as both the “course to run” (currere) and the content. The aim was the transmission of the “elements” of Reading, Religion, aRithmetic, and (w)Riting (4Rs). It was called an “elementary” school. Transformation of the learner, the tutor, and the text was never the aim of education.

Catechetical education, overseen by provincial clergy, aimed solely to provide a foundation for the moral and religious formation of those released from enslavement, as well as the children of the indentured labouring class. However, there was always a fear that even this modest effort could be thwarted by an awakening awareness in scholars of their independent value as rational agents, independent of any considerations regarding how they might serve the profitability of others.

The education of the children of the emancipated failed to receive popular support in the House of Commons in England. Dr. Eric Williams set out to reverse the patterns and practices of colonial schooling. In 1967, he submitted a draft plan for education development (1967–1983) for an independent Trinidad and Tobago.

The plan was commissioned in 1964 and was shaped by Sir Arthur Lewis, who would receive the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1979. During its implementation, there were regular course corrections following the recommendations of various committees: the 1978 C.V. Gocking Report, the 1978 A. Pantin and P. Valdez Report, the 1982 St. Clair King Committee, the 1984 Max Richards Working Party, and the William Demas Draft Development Plan (1983–1986), which examined the imperatives of adjustment.

Lewis’s primary concern was the response of the periphery to the engine of growth in the core. The core contributed to the development of the periphery by providing markets, technology, and capital. Peripheral states like Trinidad and Tobago responded in varying ways depending on their infrastructure development, geographical resources, technology, types of education provision, objective knowledge, and the forms of knowledge considered most valuable. Lewis concluded that peripheral countries had some options.

One choice required the government to protect local industry, invest in physical infrastructure, nurture technological innovation, support a class of industrial capitalists, and, most importantly, invest in developing human capability through education. For both Sir Arthur Lewis and Dr. Eric Williams, reducing dependency was necessary. The focus, therefore, was the creation of an education system that could support industrialisation.

Today, the industrialisation of intelligence with the advent of China’s Manus and the challenges of tariff turmoil offer an opportunity to remake the education system. In the Age of AI, the aims of education must respond to one question: What futures are we educating for? That answer must explore: (I) Economic Citizenship, (II) A Borderless Economy anchored in E-Commerce, (III) Cosmopolitanism, (IV) A Capabilities approach to development, (V) Intellectual and moral freedom. (VI) Changing the world, (VII) The Rise of a Creative Class, and (VIII) The Release of the Imagination.

The AI-ecology of schooling must replace the plantation 4Rs with Rigour, Richness, Relations, and Recursion. Rigour refers to purposefully seeking out alternatives, associations, and networks that allow a range of possibilities to surface from which actualizations may appear. The curriculum is stirred by multiple interpretations, incompleteness, and indeterminacy.

Recursion aims at developing the ability to use content heuristically. Richness entangles the depth of the curriculum, its layers of meaning, its multiple possibilities, indeterminacy, lived experience, flux, problematics, and trepidations. Relations refer to a curriculum design as a network or matrix with myriad cross-connections and not a catalogue. In this frame, AI-generated assessments can test higher-order thinking. AI can also be used to create dynamic simulations, and interactive environments that encourage learners to engage in higher-order cognitive activities.