Research Talk: High school education in the age of AI

Research Talk: What kind of high school education do we need in the age of Artificial Intelligence? Reform in China’s senior secondary schools.

Featuring Professor Zhang Baoge, Dean, Faculty of Teacher Education, Ningbo University

Friday, September 4, 2026

3PM - 4PM

Education Building (3700 McTavish), Room 113

In China’s high schools, artificial intelligence is working its way into the reform agenda at an unprecedented pace: learner profiling, intelligent diagnostics, algorithmic recommendation, and adaptive learning. It has gone from being a teaching aid to part of the system’s architecture. As such, what problems can AI actually solve for us? Will it make strong schools stronger and weak schools weaker? And who guarantees the security of student data? At the same time, the expectations that Chinese parents and society place on high school reform have never eased. First, anxiety over the general–vocational divide: with students sorted at the end of junior secondary into either academic or vocational upper-secondary schools, families would rather send a child to the worst general high school than the best vocational one. Second, the scramble for scarce places at good schools — visible in the exclusion of migrant families’ children, in cross-district school choice, and in urban families’ pursuit for a home inside a sought-after school zone. Third, rankings by university-admission rate. Whatever else changes, society still measures a school by one number — and that yardstick has not moved. On one side, national policy calls for diversified and distinctive development across the general high school sector; on the other, society still ranks schools by how many students they send on to university. Situated in this tension between policy and public expectation, the talk considers the room for manoeuvre available to China’s high schools, and the form senior secondary education should take in the age of artificial intelligence.

Zhang Baoge (张宝歌) is a Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Teacher Education at Ningbo University, his research focuses on foundational educational theory and on the differentiated development and reform of senior secondary schooling. He also serves as a member of the Ministry of Education's National Advisory Committee on Teaching in Higher Education Institutions. Within the field of high school education reform, he has published more than 60 scholarly articles in leading academic journals including Educational Research (《教育研究》), and has authored eight textbooks and academic monographs.