HEI Schools Perspectives #43: Early childhood education in the age of AI
Parents often bring the same worried question to HEI Schools: "The world is changing so fast. How can we best prepare our children, starting from their very first years?" To answer it honestly, it helps to look beyond today's textbooks and at the bigger shift happening around us. Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping what "success" means, and education, from university right down to the early years, will need to change with it.
In short
AI is making knowledge and routine skills cheap. Adaptability, resilience and flexible problem-solving are becoming the real advantage.
Executive function (focus, self-control, working memory and flexible thinking) grows fastest in the early years, especially between ages 3 and 5.
Play, emotional learning and a psychologically safe classroom build these skills far better than early drilling of letters and sums.
At home: let children do things for themselves, leave room for boredom, praise effort, and choose a school that values well-being over showing off early reading.
A wake-up call: what AI is doing to "safe" careers
Just a few years ago, computer science was one of the most sought-after degrees in the world. Competition for places at top universities was fierce. Today the picture looks very different: many new computer science graduates, even those with excellent results, are finding it harder to land a job than their predecessors did. AI has changed the game: basic code and routine data analysis that once took people weeks can now be produced in seconds.
This may sound new, but anyone who has lived through a few economic cycles will recognise the pattern.
When people born in the 1970s and 1980s went to university in Vietnam in the late 1990s, the popular choices were English, tourism, accounting, import-export, or engineering and the natural sciences. Many of those graduates went on to careers quite different from what they had studied.
Look at today's university intake and a similar pattern appears. Business administration, information technology and communications attract huge numbers of students, while the labour market needs fewer people for repetitive, routine work. Many of these graduates may well end up working outside their field. The gap between what universities teach and what society needs is showing once again.
When knowledge is no longer the competitive edge
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, anyone with some expertise, a quick read of the times and a little English could rise quickly. Many of today's technology leaders in Vietnam grew up in that period without a degree in their field. They succeeded not because they had the deepest academic knowledge, but because they adapted fastest.
Today, AI is creating something new: a world where knowledge is no longer scarce. Remembering and processing information used to mark people out. Now AI has turned these into everyday commodities. Researchers at OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania estimated that around 80% of the US workforce could have at least 10% of their tasks affected by large language models, and around 19% could see at least half of their tasks affected (Eloundou et al., 2023). The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39% of workers' core skills to change by 2030.
At the same time, in the author's own observation, fields such as logistics and supply chain, healthcare, applied psychology, advanced engineering and skilled trades like electrical and plumbing work are short of good people. Training systems struggle to keep up: specialists are drawn into industry by far higher salaries, and university courses take years to redesign.
So in an uncertain future, what keeps people steady? Not qualifications alone. The people who come through these shifts best are those who adapt well, who are resilient, who recover after setbacks, and who solve problems flexibly. Uncertainty brings big challenges, but it also opens doors. A new generation will have the chance to build new models and products that are more inventive and more human.
Why do the early years matter so much?
Seen in this light, parents of children from 12 months to 8 years old may want to look at their child's education quite differently.
Much of the specialist knowledge a child could learn today may look very different in 15 years. Pushing a three-year-old to memorise letters, to rattle off English or to do sums at speed means competing in exactly the areas where AI will always win.
What matters more is executive function: the set of skills that includes focus, impulse control, working memory and cognitive flexibility. Harvard's Center on the Developing Child describes it as the brain's "air traffic control" system. These skills grow especially fast between ages 3 and 5 and keep developing into early adulthood. A child with strong executive function can calm herself when things get hard, try more than one idea when solving a problem, and keep going after a stumble. This is the root of adaptability.
At HEI Schools Saigon Central, learning is designed around the evidence behind the Finnish and Vietnamese early childhood curricula, with one aim in mind: to nurture people whose strengths machines cannot replace.
How does HEI Schools build these skills?
1. Play-based learning: where creativity begins
Young children do not learn by listening to lectures. They learn through their senses and through interacting with the world around them. When a child is absorbed in building a tower of blocks, she is not "just playing". She is testing the laws of physics, learning about gravity and balance and, most importantly, learning to face failure when the tower falls. Instead of stepping in to show "the right way", teachers at HEI Schools are trained to watch and ask open questions: "Why do you think that block fell? How could we make it stand more firmly?" Working out the answer for herself builds the foundations of critical thinking, something AI cannot do for her.
The classroom itself works as a "third teacher". Projects are not mapped out rigidly in advance, but grow from children's curiosity. If a child notices a leaf changing colour in the playground, the week's project might turn towards seasons, weather, how plants live and the art of colour. Changing plans, working in a team, sharing out tasks and presenting what they found is a small model of how the real world works. In that world, uncertainty is not something to fear, but room to create.
2. Social and emotional learning
Empathy and emotional intelligence are among the clearest differences between people and machines. A four-year-old who can recognise her anger, name the feeling and take a deep breath to calm down is building the resilience she will need in fast-changing workplaces later in life. At HEI Schools, emotional learning is not a separate lesson. It is woven into every part of the day: mealtimes, the HEI Time sharing circle, and even squabbles over toys in the garden. Teachers do not judge a child's character; they guide children to take responsibility and repair what happened.
What can parents do?
Facing an uncertain future, parents do not need to panic. This is a chance to let go of the old pressure for early achievement. For children from 12 months to 8 years old, these strategies help:
Focus on independence. Independence is the first step towards adaptability. Let children do what they can for themselves: feeding, dressing, tidying their toys. A child who has not yet mastered everyday self-care will find it hard to master a changing world.
Make room for boredom. Do not fill every hour with classes and screens. Unstructured, slightly "boring" time leaves space for imagination and self-directed play.
Praise effort, not talent. When your child does well, try "You were so patient finishing this drawing" rather than "You're so clever". This builds a growth mindset: the belief that abilities can be developed, and that a mistake is information for the next try. (There is more on this in Roger Federer's 54% lesson.)
Choose an interactive, caring environment. Look for a preschool that values children's well-being over showing off how early they can read and write. Children need a psychologically safe place to try, make mistakes and learn to work with other people. (Early achievement is not the same as long-term success, as this piece on child prodigies explores.)
No one can predict exactly which technologies, programming languages or careers will matter in 15 or 20 years. But one thing seems clear: a person with inner steadiness, endless curiosity, empathy and real resilience will find their place, however the world turns.
So rather than worrying, start giving children agency from their earliest years. The strongest foundation is not built with tests, but with hands free to explore and hearts that know how to care.
References
Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. (2011). Building the brain's "air traffic control" system: How early experiences shape the development of executive function (Working Paper No. 11).
Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). (2020). CASEL framework: What is SEL?
Diamond, A. (2013). Executive functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135–168.
Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.
Eloundou, T., Manning, S., Mishkin, P., & Rock, D. (2023). GPTs are GPTs: An early look at the labor market impact potential of large language models. arXiv:2303.10130.
Finnish National Agency for Education. (2022). National core curriculum for early childhood education and care 2022.
Masten, A. S. (2014). Ordinary magic: Resilience in development. Guilford Press.
Sahlberg, P., & Doyle, W. (2019). Let the children play: How more play will save our schools and help children thrive. Oxford University Press.
World Economic Forum. (2025). The future of jobs report 2025.
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