There is a self-imposed blindness, almost endearing in its pathos, with which Western bureaucracies insist on viewing the development of the rest of the planet. While in our latitudes ministries of education and arm-chair pedagogical committees waste rivers of ink and sterile seminars deliberating whether artificial intelligence should be banned, regulated, or blessed before entering a classroom, on the other side of the Pacific the discussion is not only outdated: it is prehistoric.
The setting is neither a science fiction story nor the mockup of a futuristic utopia. It took place just a few days ago in the heart of the Shanghai International Artificial Intelligence Fair (WAIC 2026), the showcase where China unabashedly displays the abysmal distance it is carving out from the rest of the civilized world. There, the Chinese firm iFlytek presented the Tongxuan pedagogical system (powered by its Spark AI architecture), an interactive whiteboard-integrated interface that exposes the decrepitude of our educational models.
The technical demonstration is of an overwhelming fluidity. A teacher handwrites a mathematical equation on the screen and the system, without a single second of latency, not only interprets the handwritten script, but instantly displays it as an interactive parabola. Next, the teacher draws a two-dimensional flat sketch with a stylus; in less than a second, the algorithm renders the sketch into a three-dimensional geometric body in real time, ready to be rotated, analyzed in its angles, or decomposed into its axes. The whiteboard digitizes notes on the fly, generates physical simulations of natural phenomena, and records the dynamics of the lesson to feed personalized AI tutors that will accompany each student in their individual process.
But the real geopolitical slap in the face is not the technological artifact itself, but its scale of implementation. We are not talking about a single laboratory piece designed to dazzle unsuspecting visitors at a technology booth. iFlytek already has these educational systems deployed in thousands of schools, reaching more than 100 million students and teachers across the Asian nation. Artificial intelligence in China has ceased to be a novelty; it is basic pedagogical infrastructure.
The contrast with our reality is frankly agonizing. In the West, we remain attached to an instructional dogma tailored to the 19th-century Industrial Revolution, training children for an analog world that no longer exists, using methods that reward sterile memorization and punish interaction with technology. We console ourselves by invoking preventive ethical frameworks and moral panics about the “loss of cognitive skills,” while the technopolitical gap widens by leaps and bounds.
As the communicator Adrián Díaz rightly pointed out when analyzing the Shanghai milestone, the dilemma we face is brutal in its simplicity: either we resolve once and for all to stop putting bureaucratic and ideological obstacles in the way of classroom innovation, or we submissively accept our role in the rearguard of history. We continue to teach with the spirit of the inkwell and chalk while on the other side of the globe the cognition of the 21st century is being shaped in real time.
Pretending that we can compete in the global geopolitical arena while keeping our schools in an analog limbo is not caution: it is, quite simply, a systemic form of cultural suicide.