Designing Narrative Texts for Systems Thinking and Artificial Intelligence Readiness: A Prescriptive Framework for Educational Fiction

This article presents a prescriptive educational design framework for constructing narrative texts that deliberately develop systems thinking, Narrative Systems Readiness, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Readiness, and Cognitive Ownership in primary and secondary education. Building upon earlier theoretical work defining Narrative Systems Readiness and AI Readiness, this paper translates those developmental constructs into practical narrative design principles suitable for curriculum developers, educational publishers, authors, teacher educators, and classroom practitioners. The paper argues that educational narratives should be intentionally engineered to cultivate recursive reasoning, delayed consequence, hidden-state inference, feedback recognition, emergence, probabilistic reasoning, ethical judgement, intervention foresight, and model revision before learners formally engage with artificial intelligence technologies. Using the RSQS framework (Relevance, Sufficiency, Quality, Structure), the article proposes twelve Narrative AI Design Principles together with a developmental learning progression, classroom architecture, assessment framework, production methodology, and implementation guidance for Years 3-10. A central contribution is the distinction between expressive augmentation and developmental bypass. The paper argues that generative AI can appropriately augment expression once learners demonstrate independent cognitive ownership of ideas but should not replace developmental experiences required for the formation of reasoning capabilities. The article concludes that educational narratives should become deliberately designed cognitive environments that prepare learners not only for artificial intelligence literacy but also for lifelong reasoning about complex adaptive systems. This publication forms Part III of the Narrative Cognition Research Programme.