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Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Garcia: Atrificial intelligence coming to schools

by

Shaliza Hassanali
2169 days ago
20190730
Minister of Education Anthony Garcia at the launch of the textbook Foundation Readings on the History of Trinidad and Tobago at Government Campus building, Port-of-Spain.

Minister of Education Anthony Garcia at the launch of the textbook Foundation Readings on the History of Trinidad and Tobago at Government Campus building, Port-of-Spain.

SHALIZA HASSANALI

Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter An­tho­ny Gar­cia is mov­ing to in­tro­duce in all schools ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence for stu­dents.

Gar­cia made the an­nounce­ment yes­ter­day, fol­low­ing the launch of the his­to­ry text­book Foun­da­tion Read­ings on the His­to­ry of Trinidad and To­ba­go at Gov­ern­ment Cam­pus build­ing, Port-of-Spain.

His com­ment came min­utes af­ter Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley who de­liv­ered the fea­ture ad­dress at the launch said: “our cur­ricu­lum is in­ef­fec­tive in de­vel­op­ing the qual­i­ty of our cit­i­zens that Trinidad and To­ba­go should an­tic­i­pate.”

Row­ley said this prob­lem can­not be rec­ti­fied by spend­ing more mon­ey on the same things.

“It is rec­ti­fied by the com­po­nents of what goes in­to the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem. We need a re­vi­sion of our na­tion­al cur­ricu­lum for rel­e­vance.”

In the ab­sence of that, Row­ley said we would keep re­peat­ing the same mis­takes and stand in the same place while oth­ers leave us be­hind.

The PM al­so spoke about a doc­u­ment from the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion which had been au­thored by some ex­perts, who he re­fused to name, com­ing be­fore Cab­i­net for ap­proval, which was not grant­ed.

“Be­cause what the Cab­i­net was be­ing asked to do is re­duce the num­ber of sub­ject ar­eas that would be fo­cused on this new cur­ricu­lum.”

Row­ley said in the doc­u­ment iden­ti­fied ge­og­ra­phy and his­to­ry be re­moved from the cur­ricu­lum.

“That was the of­fer­ing of ex­perts. Could you imag­ine if that was ac­cept­ed?” Row­ley said.

Ques­tioned about the PM’s call for a re­vi­sion of the cur­ricu­lum, Gar­cia said that has al­ways been a sub­ject by the min­istry.

“In fact, on­ly yes­ter­day at a meet­ing of our strate­gic ex­ec­u­tive team we are look­ing at cer­tain as­pects of the cur­ricu­lum...and we are look­ing at re­vis­ing some of these as­pects. One of the ar­eas we want to pay spe­cial at­ten­tion to is in terms of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence. We have there­fore em­pow­ered the di­rec­tor of plan­ning to start look­ing at how we can in­tro­duce ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence from ear­ly child­hood right on to the ter­tiary lev­el,” Gar­cia said.

Gar­cia did not say when this will be in­tro­duced.

What is Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence

AI is an area of com­put­er sci­ence that em­pha­sizes the cre­ation of in­tel­li­gent ma­chines that work and re­act like hu­mans.

Some of the com­put­er ac­tiv­i­ties with ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence are de­signed to in­clude speech recog­ni­tion, learn­ing, plan­ning, knowl­edge, rea­son­ing and prob­lem-solv­ing.


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