Yan Xiaofang: Digital Intelligence Technology Empowers the Integrated Construction of Ideological and Political Courses in Universities, Middle Schools, and Primary Schools
Since the 18th Party Congress, the CPC Central Committee has attached great importance to the ideological and moral development of minors, adopting multiple measures to promote new progress and achievements across various sectors of work. On the New Era journey, we must implement the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education [1] and persist in grasping the ideological and moral development of minors as a strategic and foundational undertaking. We must persist over the long term in using Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era to "nourish the roots and cast the soul" [2], improve the collaborative education mechanism between schools, families, and society, and guide the vast number of minors to establish lofty ideals, practice core socialist values, and develop good moral qualities and behavioral habits. In doing so, we strive to cultivate them into builders and successors of socialism with a comprehensive development in morality, intelligence, physical fitness, aesthetic grounding, and hard work [3].
Within this overall layout, school ideological and political theory courses (hereafter "si-zheng courses") serve as the key curriculum for implementing the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education; thus, their reform and innovation possess foundational significance. Since the 18th Party Congress, the CPC Central Committee has consistently placed the construction of school si-zheng courses in a prominent position within educational work. General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important discourses on the construction of si-zheng courses have clearly defined their strategic positioning, fundamental tasks, content and methods, personnel guarantees, and leadership responsibilities. They profoundly answer major questions regarding si-zheng course construction in the New Era and serve as programmatic guidance for upholding the fundamentals and breaking new ground in si-zheng courses and achieving their connotative development. In particular, the reform methodology regarding "making good use of 'great si-zheng courses' [4]" and "promoting the integrated construction of ideological and political education in primary, secondary, and tertiary schools" has pointed the way forward for using new technologies and exploring new paradigms. This requires us to use technological innovation to empower the horizontal expansion and vertical integration of the educational landscape.
A New Paradigm of Ideological and Political Education in the Digital Age
Currently, the teaching of si-zheng courses is transitioning from being "experience-driven" to "digital-intelligence empowered." Its core essence is not merely the shallow application of technology, but the realization of natural continuity in ideological guidance across all educational stages. How to deeply integrate Generative AI with the systemic project of "integrating si-zheng courses across primary, secondary, and tertiary schools"—resolving long-standing problems such as poor articulation between stages, repetitive teaching content, and monolithic evaluation methods—has become a frontier topic awaiting exploration in the field of ideological and political education. General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized: "We must use new media and new technologies to make the work come alive, promote the high degree of integration between the traditional advantages of ideological and political work and information technology, and enhance the sense of the times and appeal." With its powerful content generation, multimodal interaction, and situational simulation capabilities, Generative AI provides unprecedented technical support for the reform of integrated si-zheng teaching across all levels.
The core challenge in merging Generative AI with si-zheng integration lies in achieving "precise articulation" and "individualized guidance" within large-scale education. The essence of Generative AI lies in its "generativity" based on complex algorithms and massive corpora, as well as the "interactve emergence" it displays during interaction. These two qualities provide a brand-new philosophical methodology and technical implementation theory for solving the integration dilemma. "Generativity" reshapes the practical paradigm of "individualized teaching" and "gradated content." For example, centered on the core concept of "common prosperity," AI can instantaneously generate narrative animation scripts for primary school students, inquiry-based case comparisons for middle school students, policy debate frameworks for high school students, and academic research summaries for university students. This "one core, multiple dimensions, generation on demand" capability allows "teaching in accordance with the educational stage" and "teaching in accordance with aptitude" to be realized at scale, truly supporting the natural gradient and organic connection of teaching content across all stages, and transforming the "spiral ascent" [5] concept of integration into operable and verifiable teaching practice.
The "interactive emergence" of Generative AI drives "process-based literacy evaluation" toward deep thinking and value insight. The interactive nature of Generative AI allows it not only to analyze a student's final answer but also to act as a "dialogue partner" and "interpreter" during the creation of "generative text" (such as real-time classroom debate corpora, inquiry-based learning reports, and reflective journals). By analyzing the records of a student's multiple debates with AI regarding "technological ethics," one can evaluate the developmental trajectory of their critical thinking and the stability of their values. This evaluation, based on "interactive emergence" data, is no longer merely an assessment of static knowledge points but an "accompanying insight" into the dynamic, constructive process of intellectual growth and value formation. It offers the unprecedented possibility of creating precise "digital portraits of ideological and political literacy" that span all educational stages. Therefore, the fusion of Generative AI and si-zheng integration represents a deep encounter between "laws of education" and "laws of technology" in the digital age. Its core functions are: first, "targeted generation," ensuring that educational content achieves intelligent adaptation in form and difficulty while keeping the value core absolutely grounded in the fundamentals; second, "deep insight," revealing a continuous map of individual ideological growth through the analysis of complex generative interactive data. This is driving ideological and political education from "uniform indoctrination" to "precision irrigation" [6], and from "experience-driven" to "data-and-intelligence driven," opening a revolutionary technical path for implementing the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education.
AI Empowering the "Deep Water Zone" of Integrated Reform
Although Generative AI brings broad prospects for the integrated reform of si-zheng courses, it still faces multiple difficulties in practical advancement that restrict its deep application and the release of its efficacy. This is primarily manifested in the fundamental contradiction between technical openness and ideological closure, the practical contradiction between tool efficiency and the complexity of education, and the institutional contradiction between the demand for data integration and lagging data governance. At the same time, there is a certain crisis of subjectivity between the acceleration of intelligent technology and the lag in the literacy of subjects [7]. This is the most hidden and profound challenge. For teachers, the difficulty lies in degrading from an "ideological leader" to a "technological operator"; for students, the risk lies in the "blunting of critical thinking" and "cognitive outsourcing." The common problem is: in the relationship between humans and technology, are humans driving the tools, or are the tools reshaping or even weakening essential human capacities? Ensuring that teachers and students maintain and strengthen their subjectivity and critical power during this intelligent transformation is a more fundamental literacy issue than learning operational skills.
Therefore, promoting the deep integration of Generative AI with the integration of si-zheng courses across all levels must not remain at the level of visionary descriptions and technical listing. It must focus on breaking through deep-seated mechanistic obstructions and constructing a new collaborative education paradigm with clear goals, defined rights and responsibilities, and human-machine complementarity.
A New Ecosystem of "Platform–Content–Teaching–Evaluation"
Regarding platform mechanisms, to address data silos and barriers of rights and responsibilities, blockchain technology can be introduced to construct a "Digital Passport for Ideological and Political Literacy." Data on the development of students' key literacies can be stored on a cross-school consortium blockchain in the form of "hashes" after de-sensitization and auditing. This forms an unalterable chain of growth trajectories, transforming data sharing from a reliance on administrative orders into a credential of rights based on technical trust. Educational administrative departments and expert teams set standards, blockchain platforms guarantee data security, and teachers are responsible for auditing, confirming, and explaining the connotation of the literacy data.
In terms of content resources, to resolve the contradiction between the ideological risks of AI-generated content and the efficacy of manual auditing, it is necessary to establish a "generation–audit–feedback" reinforcement learning closed-loop mechanism. AI generates gradated resource drafts based on authoritative source libraries; si-zheng backbone teachers from various educational stages form a "manual value firewall" to conduct three-level audits and mark problematic content; the audit results are then used as feedback data to reverse-train the large educational model, forming a precise and reliable evolutionary mechanism. AI handles the processing of massive materials and initial generation, while teachers maintain final audit rights over content and continuous value correction.
In teaching models, to avoid the problem of superficiality caused by the disconnection between virtual scenarios and deep speculation, a scenario R&D mechanism driven by "cross-stage virtual teaching and research offices" should be constructed. Teachers from university Schools of Marxism, frontline primary and secondary teachers, and educational technology experts should jointly lead the development of teaching design scripts for AI scenarios. For example, designing a "common prosperity" simulation sandbox to guide students of different stages to engage in role-based interactive decision-making. AI generates realistic environments and dynamic event flow processing for structured interactions, while teachers ascend to become guides and interpreters of the virtual world, transforming virtual experiences into profound realistic cognitions.
In the field of evaluation governance, achieving a scientific assessment of internalized ideological and political literacy requires interdisciplinary breakthroughs in educational measurement and AI. Si-zheng experts quantify core literacies into observable behavioral characteristics, while AI technology experts construct multimodal data extraction algorithm models, establishing a continuous verification closed-loop of "algorithmic initial evaluation—teacher review—case correction." AI is responsible for 24/7 data collection, calculation, and risk early warning, while teachers conduct manual reviews and educational interpretations of the evaluation results, forming "warm" reports on student growth.
The core of this "four-in-one" new ecosystem lies in clearly defining the boundaries of rights and responsibilities between technical logic and educational laws, and between instrumental rationality and value rationality through profound mechanistic innovation. Only in this way can the powerful capabilities of Generative AI be effectively "contained" and precisely "guided" onto the correct track of integrated si-zheng education, ultimately achieving a profound sublimation from instrumental empowerment to paradigmatic restructuring.