There is a particular kind of stress that only comes from being handed a microphone and a question you did not prepare for.
That was me recently at a Toastmasters Division-level Table Topics Contest. For those unfamiliar, Table Topics is the speaking equivalent of being pushed into a swimming pool and being told, “You look like someone who knows freestyle.”
You are given a prompt on the spot. No notes. No time to rehearse. Just two minutes to think, structure, entertain, persuade, and ideally not black out. Five contestants stood there that day, each pretending to look calm in the way people do when internally they are hearing drums of war.
Then came the prompt: should a child not be allowed to learn AI before the child studies history?
Now, some people hear that question and immediately think policy, curriculum design, educational priorities, syllabus sequencing. I heard something else. I heard a misunderstanding.
So when it was my turn, I asked the audience whether they agreed that history should take precedence over learning AI. Then I challenged the framing itself. Because too many of us, especially in Singapore, hear the word history and immediately picture a classroom fan that is somehow never strong enough, a textbook thicker than justice, and the memorisation of dates that vanish from memory five minutes after the exam.
We reduce history into formal schooling. We mistake history for assessment. We confuse history with sitting down.
And that, I think, is where we get it wrong.
History is not merely a subject in school. It is a way of understanding how the present came to be. The historian David McCullough once said, “History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.”
That line matters because history is not trapped in archives. It breathes through ordinary life.
Take Singapore. Sit in a Ya Kun Kaya Toast outlet for five minutes and you will likely see parts of its company story displayed on the walls: when it began, how it grew, what it served, what it stood for. That is history.
The kaya toast on your plate is not just breakfast. It is migration, trade routes, adaptation, working-class routines, kopi culture, inherited taste, and national memory with butter. Your soft-boiled eggs are basically edible anthropology.
But many of us walk past these things as though culture is wallpaper. We think history only counts when it comes with footnotes.
Singapore, to be fair, is excellent at organising learning. We timetable it. We standardise it. We colour-code it. We sometimes laminate it. But the danger of being efficient is that we may only recognise learning when it looks official.
If a child reads about the Japanese Occupation in a textbook, we say they are learning history. If the same child listens to a grandparent describe rationing, fear, resilience, or kampung life, we call it “just conversation.”
That is absurd.
Research in education has long shown that learning happens socially and contextually. Lev Vygotsky, known for his work on social learning, argued that knowledge develops through interaction with others and culture. In simpler terms: children learn not only from books, but from people, environments, rituals, stories, and participation.
So yes, a museum can teach history. But so can a hawker centre. So can family gatherings. So can old songs played in the car while your uncle insists they “don’t make music like this anymore.”
Every family has one uncle who behaves like a heritage board.
That was the core of my speech. Why are we debating whether a child should learn history before AI, when the child is already immersed in history every day?
The food they eat has history. The language they speak has history. The festivals they celebrate have history. The roads they travel on have history. The housing estate they live in has history. Even the slang they use has history.
Somewhere, somehow, somebody invented “alamak.”
A child does not need to wait for Secondary Two to meet history. History has been sitting beside them since birth.
The real question is not whether history comes first. It already did.
Now let us talk about the shiny robot in the room: AI. Some people treat AI as though it is an optional future topic, something children may encounter one day, like taxes or lower back pain. But AI is already here.
Recommendation algorithms shape what children watch. Search tools influence how they find answers. Translation tools affect language use. Generative systems are changing writing, art, coding, customer service, and education. UNESCO has repeatedly stressed the importance of AI literacy, especially ethical literacy, for young people navigating a digital world.
So if history is already around us, AI soon will be too—if it is not already.
Which means forcing a false choice between them makes little sense. It is like asking whether a child should learn to walk before learning to breathe. Both are happening in different ways already.
Many public debates suffer from this problem. We love false binaries because they are dramatic. Books or screens. Science or arts. Tradition or progress. Discipline or creativity. History or AI.
But real life is messier and wiser than debate prompts.
Children need historical awareness and technological literacy. They need memory and imagination. They need roots and tools.
The futurist Alvin Toffler famously said, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
That applies beautifully here. History helps us learn from the past. AI forces us to relearn the future. Why choose one hand when we were given two?
History is not just nostalgia. It provides safeguards. When children learn history meaningfully, they understand patterns: how power can be abused, how propaganda spreads, how inequality grows, how innovation can help and harm, how societies respond to change.
These lessons matter enormously in the age of AI.
If you understand the history of industrial revolutions, labour displacement, surveillance, or media manipulation, you approach AI with sharper eyes. You ask better questions. Who benefits? Who is left behind? Who controls the tool? What values are embedded in the system?
History gives moral depth to innovation. Without it, progress can become speed without direction.
Likewise, AI can enrich the study of history. It can help students explore archives, compare sources, visualise timelines, translate documents, and widen access to knowledge. Used well, technology can animate curiosity.
The issue is not AI itself. The issue is whether we teach discernment.
A calculator did not destroy mathematics. The internet did not destroy reading. PowerPoint, regrettably, did wound many presentations, but that is another article.
I think the speech resonated because it did something audiences appreciate: it questioned the assumptions hidden inside the question. Sometimes the smartest answer is not choosing Side A or Side B. It is asking whether the road itself was badly built.
Too often we inherit narrow definitions of learning. We think knowledge only counts when graded. We think culture only counts when curated. We think history only counts when old. We think technology only counts when new.
But life does not divide itself so neatly.
Winning the contest means I now proceed to the District level, which is exciting and mildly terrifying. But beyond trophies, certificates, and the temporary ego boost of hearing your name announced, I hope the speech nudged some people to reconsider how they view history.
History is not dead matter sealed behind museum glass. It is not the punishment of memorising dates in tropical humidity. It is not merely learning about dead people.
History is alive.
It is in your grandmother’s recipes. It is in the queue system at hawker stalls. It is in the MRT map. It is in why certain neighbourhoods look the way they do. It is in the songs played during festive seasons. It is in the names we carry. It is in the words we borrow from one another. It is in the stories we repeat.
And if we are paying attention, it can make us humbler.
Because history reminds us that many things we think are permanent are not. Empires fell. Technologies changed. Norms shifted. People adapted.
Which is comforting, really.
It means we can too.
So should a child learn history before AI?
Maybe the wiser answer is this: a child is already learning history. A child is already entering the world of AI. Our job is not to place these in competition. Our job is to help them meet both with curiosity, wisdom, and humanity.
Also, if possible, with good kaya toast.
Written by: Adi Jamaludin
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