China Teaches AI Before Math - Will the World Catch Up?
From Shanghai to the smallest villages, 200 million children now dive into artificial intelligence as part of their daily lessons — and the rest of the world is scrambling to keep up.
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Forget times tables and spelling bees. In China, six-year-olds are now learning how to talk to smart speakers, understand facial recognition, and even debate privacy rights. By the time they hit middle school, they’ll be tinkering with algorithms and neural networks. And in high school? They’ll be building Artificial Intelligence models and designing systems.
This isn’t a pilot. It’s policy, and on September 1, 2025, China actually flipped the switch - making AI education mandatory for every single student in the country.
Over 200 million children, overnight, joined the world’s largest classroom experiment in tech literacy.
Other nations are racing to respond.
South Korea is rushing budgets into AI schools. Australia is rewriting curriculums. Estonia and the UAE are pushing pilots. But no one matches China’s sheer scale, or its unapologetic ambition to raise a generation fluent in the “mother tongue” of artificial intelligence.
Education experts are blunt: the global AI learning market is on track to top $20 billion by 2027, but China has already claimed the head start. The rest of the world still somewhat at the starting line, watching as Beijing turns its kids into the coders of the future.