“In the AI era, the goal of our education is not to have a thousand students provide the same correct answer, but to teach a thousand students how to ask ten thousand different, good questions.” Yesterday, which was Laba Festival, Jack Ma, dressed in a white shirt and black jacket, appeared via video as scheduled for the annual "Laba Festival Appointment." He engaged with rural teachers from across the country on a perplexing topic: in the age of AI, will rural education be left behind by artificial intelligence?

Yesterday also marked the announcement of the 11th cohort of the Jack Ma Rural Teacher Award. Over the past 11 years, the program has supported a cumulative total of 1,101 rural teachers. Among this year's awardees are passionate educators who, after rational deliberation, went to Xinjiang to realize their life's value; there is also a young woman from Xiamen who crossed professional boundaries to teach in Daliangshan and became a school principal within just five years... These teachers are full of ideas and unafraid to make choices, yet they harbor doubts, such as how rural education should confront the challenge of AI.

Ma shared his reflections on AI during the online session. He stated that while AI presents a challenge to rural education, it is, more importantly, an opportunity to return education to its fundamental purpose. “In the AI era, we should no longer hesitate about whether to use AI, but rather focus on how to teach our children to utilize AI effectively. With AI, the goal of our education shifts from training children to compete with AI in calculation and memorization, to encouraging them to maintain their curiosity, for curiosity is the true source of computing power. The divide in the AI era is not primarily a technological gap, but rather a gap in curiosity, imagination, creativity, judgment, and collaborative ability,” Ma said. He believes that the future of education in the AI era is not about making children memorize more or remember more facts, but about encouraging them to think in more interesting, creative, and unique ways. “In the AI era, the goal of our education is not to have a thousand students provide the same correct answer, but to teach a thousand students how to ask ten thousand different, good questions,” Ma emphasized. The Jack Ma Rural Teacher Program is a philanthropic initiative launched by the Jack Ma Foundation in 2015. It aims to enhance the quality of rural education through financial support and professional training, selecting 100 teachers annually and providing each with 100,000 RMB in funding along with three years of developmental support.