Model Students: Argentina launches an AI plan for education

May 27, 2025

Argentina’s Ministry of Human Capital has released a plan called PaideIA to incorporate AI into education to boost student outcomes and improve their preparedness for job market.

“It seeks to promote the critical, conscious, and ethical use of artificial intelligence tools to produce texts, organize information, and solve specific problems at both educational levels,” reports La Nación.
Schools play a fundamental role in promoting the use of AI, said Diego García Francés of Educabot, an Argetine ed tech company.
One core element of the initiative is to ensure that AI does not replace teachers but rather functions as a tool to enhance learning.
Educator Camila Mendizábal notes that there is no existing AI curriculum for teachers, and that the plan will only work if educators are adequately trained in how to manage AI in classrooms.

Latin American schools are grappling with the same problems facing educators around the world: students suddenly submitting flawless assignments, concerns about chatbots replacing student thinking, and the lack of clear guidelines and policies to help schools navigate this shift.

Chilean educational institutions in are entering the AI era unprepared, with no national frameworks and little training, writes Nassib Segovia Moreno, Deputy Dean of Faculty at Chile’s Universidad de Lleida.
The rapid deployment of AI risks replacing the hard work of thinking itself, producing “students with excellent output and no intellectual muscle,” writes Francisco Sorto Rivas of the Pedagogical University of El Salvador.
Latin American countries are exploring ways to take advantage of AI’s benefits to education while limiting its moral hazards. In the Brazilian town of Saquarema, best known as a surf haven, authorities have announced plans to create an AI-focused university, reports O Dia.

Many of the region’s education-related AI initiatives focus on automating administrative tasks such that teachers can spend more time teaching and institutions can focus more on education.
Uruguay’s national education platform, Ceibal, has launched the EduIA Lab, a sandbox for experimenting with AI tools to reduce administrative burdens and provide tutoring support. El Pais
São Paulo is deploying AI to correct student homework and tests with the aim of giving teachers more time to engage students. CNN Brasil
Mexican fintech company Mattilda has launched a tool called Matti AI to help private schools in Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia increase the efficiency of payment processing, reduce administrative workload and improve financial management.

The dilemma of what to do about AI in classrooms is generating a broad debate about what education means in the era of artificial intelligence.
In a recent podcast episode, Ezra Klein discusses this with Brookings Institution education expert Rebecca Winthrop. Klein acknowledges that the underlying reason we want our kids to get an education is to make sure they can get a job - does this mean the same things in a world of chatbots?
A New York Magazine story entitled Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College describes a crisis on campuses in which students are routinely using artificial intelligence to write papers and do reading assignments. A professor friend of mine corroborated this, saying students who get caught writing papers with AI simply end up doing it again.
One college student demanded that Northeastern University refund the tuition for a course in which a professor was caught using ChatGPT to generate lecture notes, according to the New York Times. The professor acknowledged the need for transparency, but educators overall - much like students? - argue that AI makes them more productive.

AI represents a fundamental shift in education worldwide because it undermines institutions’ abilities to measure student learning while at the same time throwing into question what students really need from an education.
Throughout the history of academia, handing in a paper without doing the work required plagiarism - which provided no intellectual benefit to the student and also created stigma, shame and clear consequences for those caught doing it.
Having a chatbot write a college essay - probably badly - is still looked down upon but lands in a more ambiguous grey zone that carries an aura of futuristic technological prowess. And of course how bad can it be if the professor’s doing it too?

AI has upended basic ideas about what education is supposed to deliver and how it’s supposed to measure those results. It’s resurfacing questions about how much of this is really useful - do high school students actually need three years of algebra?
I have over the years found the basic principles of algebra to be useful in real-life settings but agree with my high school self that trigonometry was little more than arcane tedium. My brother, an architect by training, says he uses trig all the time.
Could students simply learn the basic concepts of solving for X without hours of solving complex equations?
Almost every high school student has asked this question in efforts to escape work they didn’t like. “That’s just the way it is,” is the typical response they get. It still seems like the correct one to me. I’m not sure how much longer it will be.