Why Is the Ministry of Education Using AI Slop in the Curriculum?

Once upon a time, back in the ‘good old days’ we, as a country, prided ourselves on our abilities to do ‘our own thing,’ to forge a way ahead using the skills and talents of our citizens. The old ‘number 8 wire’ mentality is an example. Another one that springs to mind goes back over 50 years, to the late New Zealand racing driver and racing car constructor Bruce McLaren explaining why he aimed to employ New Zealand mechanics – he reasoned that these mechanics, who learned their trade back in the days of import restrictions, often found that the parts they needed weren’t readily available off the shelf and so they had to use their creativity to come up with solutions. I still know mechanics who can do this.

Once upon a time, back in the ‘good old days,’ New Zealand was world renowned for its education policies and programmes. New Zealand educators, whether academics or teachers, were viewed as having the knowledge and skills to be able to develop our unique education system, including the development of what were once called ‘syllabi’ (these days called curriculum documents) that laid out the teaching and learning programmes for school to follow. I well recall being involved in a teacher working party assisting with the development of a new Physical Education syllabus.

How the mighty have fallen. We now find that the Ministry of Education, no doubt under direction from the Minister of Education, has resorted to using AI to mine curriculum documents from around the world. As a result the documents appear to be a hodgepodge of bits and pieces scraped from all over the place, lacking in coherency – reminds me of the old joke about a camel being a horse designed by a committee.

This shambles is detailed at length by Josh Drummond on the Emily Writes blog – as usual I will discuss selections, however I encourage you to read the full article for yourself.

The Ministry of Education is using so much AI it can’t tell us how much AI it’s using

‘Last year, we discovered that the Ministry for Education was using AI to develop the new school curriculum. In a response to an Official Information Act request made by a member of the public, the Ministry said it was using AI to “enhance development processes across the curriculum as a whole, particularly by analysing and synthesising information from international curricula and related educational frameworks.”’

Once upon a time, back in the ‘good old days, overseas educators came to New Zealand to learn from us, now we are reducing to scraping insights from overseas. You can bet that the information being sourced is narrowly focussed on ‘the knowledge based curriculum’ rather than on excellent education in general. 

One can also surmise that one reason for the Ministry resorting to AI is that quality and reputable information about the ‘knowledge based curriculum’ is hard to find, given that it appears to be a niche practice not favoured by many countries.

‘More than six months later, after a series of OIA requests and an investigation by the Office of the Ombudsman, we can reveal three things:

The Ministry is using an enormous amount of AI in the development of the new New Zealand curriculum, and;

The Ministry really doesn’t seem to want the public to know exactly how much AI it’s using – or exactly what it’s using AI for;

And, finally: the slap-dash use of AI in Government Ministries is a huge problem for freedom of information and open democracy.

We can draw these conclusions not because the Ministry has complied with our OIA request, but because it has refused it.’

Why did the Ministry refuse this? The article explains this, but in short:

‘There was simply too much material covered by our amended request to release it. According to the Ministry, producing evidence of AI use across just one month of curriculum development would require an entire week’s work.

In other words, when it comes to the development of the New Zealand Curriculum, they’re using so much AI they can’t tell the public how much AI they’re using.

However, in correspondence with the Ombudsman’s investigation team, the Ministry revealed some specifics about their AI use.

The Ombudsman’s letter states:

The Ministry said it identified 315 interactions potentially within scope of your request (That is, Copilot interactions within the relevant timeframe and made by staff who were working on the curriculum. These interactions have not been assessed for whether they concerned Phase 2 Social Sciences curriculum development specifically.)

That’s a lot of AI use, and thanks to the Ministry’s refusal, we don’t get to know how much AI slop is ending up in the curriculum.

We do have some clues. Remember, the Ministry itself says it is using AI for “analysing and synthesising information from international curricula and related educational frameworks.”

We’ve read a lot of the draft curriculum, and we’ve noted how it seemed like a dense, confused mishmash of subjects and unsuitable topics, and that it contains a lot of the hallmarks of AI writing.’

Concerned yet? Remember that the learning programmes provided to your children will be derived from, and based on, the new curriculum documents.

‘Meanwhile, teachers have been almost universally scathing about the proposed curriculum, saying (most recently) that it is “unrealistic,” “a return to the 1980s,” “boring,” and that “students will be harmed.”

Based on these new revelations, we think that an enormous amount of the curriculum is either paraphrased from or “synthesised” by AI, and if so, that may account for many of the problems that experts have with it.

But we don’t know for sure, because – even after nearly eight months and an Ombudsman investigation – the Ministry refuses to be up-front with the public about its AI use.

This matters. School curricula are meant to last for many years. The curriculum affects every aspect of teaching in New Zealand schools. The public has a right to know how AI is being used in the creation of material that will teach their children.

On a more philosophical note, students using that curriculum will be expected to complete assessments using their own brains, because that’s what learning is. If they just used AI to complete their work, that’d be cheating, and they wouldn’t learn anything.‘

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, after all our dear leader suggested to Rotorua business leaders that their problems could be solved with the use of Claude AI.

‘To us, using a technology that generates so much material that its use is impossible to disclose without “substantial collation and research” seems like either incompetence or wilful obfuscation. It also raises the question: Is AI use helping our agencies at all? Or is it just producing… slop?’

I reiterate: curriculum documents are the very basis, the foundational documents on which schools and teachers plan learning programmes for children. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but it seems to me that basing learning on ‘AI slop’ is potentially disastrous for the children of this country, my grandkids included.

What happened to the days when we were proud of our own educational abilities, able to develop quality, world renowned curriculum documentation? How we have fallen. 

This is where Stanford (and those behind her) have taken our education system. This, mind you, just continues the destruction that was started by the 4th Labour government in 1990 and continued by successive governments regardless of governing party.

As I’ve written previously, politicians need to get out of the provision of education, returning instead to their former role of setting goals and overall policy, and then developing systems, led by those who actually are skilled and knowledgeable educators, that will enable the goals to be achieved. 

This, in fact, is the approach used by Finland, generally accepted as having one of the best education systems in the world, an accolade that used to apply to New Zealand.

Sadly as we’ve followed overseas ideologies such as the ‘knowledge based curriculum’ we’ve thrown that away and are now in a race to see who is the most mediocre – what do expect when Stanford is basing everything on a book she read and on slavishly following the once excellent and now failing English education system?

You can change this in November!