Letters | Hong Kong’s AI education quest needs human connection to succeed
Readers discuss the importance of emotional and social learning, a suggestion to internationalise Hong Kong’s university entrance exam, and a way to encourage more Chinese to get married
In a recent Chinese-language blog post, Hong Kong’s undersecretary for education Dr Jeff Sze Chun-fai wrote about the city’s digital education blueprint. We at Just Feel welcome the government’s commitment to strengthening the city’s artificial intelligence-related competencies, enhancing teachers’ professional development and expanding resources for schools. But as Hong Kong advances its digital transformation, one principle deserves equal weight: meaningful learning, whether for teachers or students, is fundamentally relational.
Professor Cheng Kai-ming’s long-standing call to “return learning to students” emphasises the need to cultivate self-regulated learners, active learners and a strong sense of student agency. From our frontline work through the Compassionate School Programme, we consistently see that such agency is not developed by technology alone. It grows in emotionally safe and respectful environments where students can identify feelings, express needs and build supportive peer relationships.
This reflects the principle often described as “Maslow before bloom”: when emotional needs are supported, higher-order learning becomes possible.
Three weeks ago, our team joined the Belt and Road Teacher Development Exchange Project in Shanghai, under the theme “Social and Emotional Learning for Teachers and Students in the AI Era”. After two days of largely one-way presentations in which participants remained seated with limited interaction, we led an experiential session that invited them to stand up, move around and engage in structured conversations designed to help them get to know one another, listen with curiosity and build authentic connection. Participants – academics, policymakers and officials from 22 countries – told us they wished such relational grounding had occurred on day one.
Experiencing this sense of psychological safety and human connection met their needs for trust, belonging and clarity – conditions that enabled them to participate more openly and make sense of AI’s implications in a more grounded way. Such relational readiness is often a prerequisite for deep learning, especially when navigating unfamiliar technologies.