AI, AI, Oh! How we use artificial intelligence in Chilliwack classrooms could shape the future: Local Election 2026

Unfettered use of a nascent technology this powerful is dangerous – as is pretending AI isn’t already here, life-changing and revolutionary

September 24, 2026

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not simply a new technology that should or shouldn’t be used in the classroom by teachers, by students. AI is a revolutionary technology causing a once in a lifetime cultural shift. 

History will define moments of transformative change for human beings: harnessing fire, invention of the wheel, language, the printing press, radio, telephone, television, the internet and now, artificial intelligence.

The open-source and free AI that people are using today are little more than high-powered search engines being used to research, to create graphs, diagrams, powerpoint presentations, images and videos. These large-language models are actually somewhat primitive and new that represent the tip of the iceberg. Entry-level AI used in 2026 is akin to black-and-white televisions with rabbit ears or dial-up internet. What exists at the highest levels, what is already being used for business, and what is inevitably coming to all of us sooner or later will truly astonish and change the way we work and live in many ways.

All that is to say that AI is here. We can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. 

Fire cooks our food yet can burn down our forests. The wheel transports our goods while motor-vehicle crashes cause untold death. TV and the internet can at times educate us, entertain us, rot our brains, turn us into monsters.

Will AI transform us into futuristic innovators on a next step of evolution or will it destroy humanity? Likely something in between, but where will we land?

What role AI plays in classrooms will be a critical question over the term of the next school board in Chilliwack, from 2026 to 2030, it may in fact be the most important issue affecting our children’s futures. Despite that, there is roiling uncertainty across education sectors in Canada. Province to province, district to district, teachers' union to teachers' union, all are grappling with what to permit what to ban how to use it, how not to use it.

“Artificial intelligence (AI) is shifting the goalposts of teaching and learning in ways that are at once compelling and concerning. As teachers experiment with AI in lesson planning, instruction, assessment, and administrative tasks, they are also grappling with how to ethically and judiciously access and use AI tools in professional and pedagogical capacities.”

That's from a May 2026 research paper created by the B.C. Teachers' Federation. It outlines the controversy, the potential, the concerns, and is well worth a read for anyone with parents in the school district or anyone concerned about education and, heck, the future of the planet.

Embrace, ban or pause?

School districts across the province are implementing AI policies for both students and teachers. At the end of the 2025/2026 school year, the Vancouver School Board (VSB) approved Microsoft Copilot to be used as a AI chatbots. 

Vancouver parent Ben Humphreys was concerned about the impacts on his then six-year-old daughter as she began her schooling career introduced to chatbots to answer her personal questions.

In addition to the fact that questions asked of a teacher in a classroom helps every child who hears the question and the answer, group conversations spur more questions and different questions and most important of all, sparks lateral thinking, which leads to intellectual creativity and invention and art.

Twenty-eight artificial intelligence chatbots answering 28 children’s individual questions privately is problematic for many reasons. The above group learning, to start, but also these are beta versions of chatbots that make errors, are often programmed to be both falsely confident about possibly incorrect information and sycophantic to those asking questions. 

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True education is about coming up against a wall and figuring out how to go over it or around it or under it or how to take it apart brick by brick. Using AI chatbots to study math or history or political science eliminates the wall. We learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. Humphreys said his concern is that using AI in this way is “creating a generation of office workers and not a generation of good citizens.”

AI chatbots strip the friction from childhood, which is the productive struggle that is the basis for education. 

I have a university degree from the University of Western Ontario (rebranded later simply as Western University). I have an honours bachelor of arts. The honours only means that I maintained a certain average and is a four-year degree rather than three. My major was philosophy, which is often the punchline of jokes as an example of an education with zero utility in the real world. What I learned in my years since then and more so in hindsight is that a university arts degree may not have obvious practical use in many fields of employment, it teaches you how to expand your mind and improve. You learn how to learn, an invaluable life skill. Reading the most brilliant minds throughout modern human history, pondering complex ideas from logic to reasoning to epistemology to humanism helps a brain in every other aspect of life.

It's not the university degree or college diploma that matters, it's the education received along the way. As American speculative fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin writes in her 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness: “It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”

Chilliwack School Board election issue

AI in the classroom needs to be an issue discussed in this October 17, 2026 school board election.

One of a school board’s functions is to approve strategic plans and policies in district schools. This can include the use of technologies in and out of classrooms in our facilities. While trustees don’t generally get involved in the nuts and bolts of curriculum or how teachers teach, AI transcends all aspects of jurisdiction in B.C.’s education system.

Here are four questions:
1. Should teachers be using AI to create presentations, lesson plans, to craft projects for kids to then respond to?
2. Should students be using chatbots in classrooms to help them learn difficult subjects such as math, to research for essays, to design graphics and images as part of projects?
3. Should AI become part of the curriculum, as in, should teachers be trained on the origins of AI, what it is, what it is not, what it is being used for, what it could become, and teach that to students?
4. Should we have a moratorium, a pause to study not whether AI is helpful and harmful – it clearly has the potential for both – but how is it helpful and harmful and how can we harness the help, hinder the harm?

See below for my answers to these four questions as a candidate for the Chilliwack School Board.

Humphreys is part of a group called Parents for AI Caution in Education Spaces in Vancouver. The group launched a petition to pause the use of AI for at least two years while its use is studied for beneficial and negative effects.

“I think a lot of parents are uncomfortable with their children being the Guinea pigs or the beta testers for this new technology,” he said as part of a June 2026 CBC story.

At the same time, AI is here and it is here to stay so we can't pretend it doesn't exist and won't be used.

In the same article referenced above, Surrey Schools superintendent Mark Pearmain pointed out that AI is out there, and kids are already using ChatGPT and Claude outside the classroom. Their parents are using it. So it’s important for kids to learn how to use it properly, now.

“AI is here. The genie is not going to be put back into the bottle and in fact, it's only going to expand and grow into the future.”

As a candidate for the Chilliwack School Board, I have some experience with AI that could definitely be useful around the board table. I currently work on contract for a technology firm based in San Francisco as an expert in my field helping to train next-generation AI systems for leading AI labs.

There is a lot of discussion online these day about AI-generated videos, images, event posters, presentations, and text. Often we see these AI-generated products and feel that they are AI, even obviously so, but it’s not easy to articulate why. As one meme put it, AI-generated images look the way that Christian rock sounds. It’s almost right, but something is just weird and wrong.

Here are words I never imagined I would said, say I have been trained and consider myself an expert in identifying so-called “AI slop.” As part of my onboarding to do the expert human training of AI models I was required to score at least 80 per cent on an AI slop quiz. I got 95 per cent. Being able to dissect language that is AI slop, that is, prose created by large-language models clumsily using next-word prediction rather than human cognition is not easy. Even with that high score, I have to focus hard to explain why a certain piece of writing was created by AI, whether the prose uses too many clichés, too much jargon, or is otherwise grammatically awkward and unnatural.

This is, I believe, an important skill. That being said, we need our educators to learn this skill at least to a basic level to help teach our students what not to do as well as to help to generally stop cheating at higher levels.

In response to the above four questions, these are my answers as a School Board candidate:

1. On teachers and AI use: For the most part, no. Teachers should be using AI only as much as they might have done research in other ways for their educational plans. Without proper training in identifying AI slop it will inevitably sneak into lesson plans and presentations to the detriment of our students.
2. On students and chatbots: Sure, but only inasmuch as search engines or Wikipedia are used with proper and accurate footnotes and sourcing of the material collated and provided by a chatbot.
3. On teaching about AI: Absolutely. They need to learn about AI whether or not they are allowed to use it. This is a life skill. I also believe students should have more education in personal finances, employment, heck, I think cooking should be mandatory.
4. On a moratorium: Maybe. But it depends what that looked like. We can’t arbitrarily ban a technology’s use when we know it will be used outside the classroom anyway. That is trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube. The good news about technology evolving exponentially quickly is that its impacts – at least short term – are being studied in real time and we will have answers relatively quickly regarding AI best practices to harness this fire, use this wheel, to use this technology to the benefit of the next generations.

What is certain is that AI is here to stay and it has enormous potential as a teaching aid, a tutor, a research tool. But there are dangers and as a school board we need to proceed cautiously if expeditiously.

The future is now.

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Paul J. Henderson
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