Oussama Ammar sees the Emirates teaching AI from kindergarten, and points to the detail everyone skips

Dubai, United Arab Emirates - 30 September, 2026 - The Emirati Ministry of Education announced that artificial intelligence would become a compulsory subject in every public school, from kindergarten through Grade 12, beginning with the following academic year. The decision was made public by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum himself.

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A subject that costs no extra hours

What makes the plan unusual is not the announcement. Several countries have promised something similar. It is the way the subject was slotted in.

No additional hours were added to the week. The new material was folded into an existing course covering computing, creative design and innovation, and handed to the teachers already running it. Seven areas were defined: how the technology works, data and algorithms, software applications, ethics, real world uses, project design, and public policy.

The progression follows age rather than ambition. In the earliest years, children meet the ideas through stories, discussion and games. Later they learn how a machine arrives at an answer, then how to build and train a simple model, and only at the end do they touch the practical craft of instructing a system properly.

Less screen time, not more

The counterintuitive part, reported by the Emirati press this month, is that the curriculum deliberately avoids putting children in front of screens. In the early years it is taught unplugged, with nothing switched on at all.

The founding primary principal of a school in Abu Dhabi described the approach as strictly unplugged, aimed at building a pupil's conceptual understanding before any tool is opened. A Dubai head teacher put the target plainly: success would not be every classroom using the technology every day, but pupils using it purposefully and selectively. A group director of education elsewhere in the country framed the discipline she wants taught in one line: think first, use it with purpose, verify everything.

Supervised use is generally approved from the age of thirteen. Below that, the exposure is led by the teacher. Time is deliberately protected for writing, arithmetic and making things without assistance. The government has committed to training twenty two thousand teachers and educators.

Why a founder in the region is paying attention

Oussama Ammar [https://oussamaammar.com/], an entrepreneur born in Beirut and now based in the Emirates, where he heads a company built around applied artificial intelligence, spends his working life on the corporate version of the same problem. His company rewrites entire operating processes as software for large organisations.

His central observation, repeated often to his own audience [https://x.com/daedalium], is that the obstacle is almost never technical. Models are available to anyone. What resists is human: the undocumented know-how, the local habit nobody wrote down, the gap between the procedure as described and the work as actually performed. Projects stall because people and systems do not understand one another, not because the mathematics failed.

Read against that, the Emirati curriculum is doing something more interesting than teaching children to use software. It is teaching them the conceptual vocabulary to think about machines before they ever rely on one. Two decades from now, those pupils will be the employees who can say precisely what their job involves, including the parts no manual mentions. That is the single scarcest input in the whole field.

The unglamorous version usually wins

There is no spectacle in any of this. No robot in the classroom, no demonstration for visiting officials. A subject folded into an existing timetable, taught by existing staff, deliberately kept away from screens for the youngest pupils, with a training programme attached.

It is the same pattern that separates the corporate projects that survive from those quietly abandoned after a pilot. Narrow scope, a clear objective, and people who were taught the thing properly before being handed the tool.

About Oussama Ammar

Oussama Ammar is an entrepreneur and technology professional based in the United Arab Emirates, with a focus on applied artificial intelligence and business transformation. His work explores how organisations can use AI and software to improve operational processes and address the human and organisational challenges involved in technology adoption.

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