Does AI make teachers obsolete?
Not if we know what we truly value.
In a keynote I presented to educators in Chicago last week, I tackled a pretty big question head on: will teachers and schools be replaced when AI disrupts how students learn, access and create content. Now that the proxies we’ve used to measure achievement no longer hold water, what is the point of school?
These are pretty existential questions that students, parents, and higher education institutions are wrestling with, right now. And employees across industries, including educators, are wondering if they’ll become irrelevant or replaced in the AI era.
But the answer is really pretty clear that they won’t. That is, if we’re willing to hold on to what we value and let go of past practices that no longer work. And that fear of change we feel is actually a good thing, because it can help us remember what we value most. Here’s what I mean.
For centuries, the measure of a “good” artist was their ability to render the natural world accurately–the more realistic a painting, the better it was, and therefore the more skilled and talented the artist. Technical mastery was the main measure of talent and value of a painting.
Until a new technology disrupted that practice: the camera.
A painter’s ability to render the natural world accurately was no match for the mechanical reproduction of photography. Suddenly painters were obsolete. Or were they?
It turns out that painters didn’t become less important, they actually became more important. Painting became less about mechanical reproduction and more about intellectual ideas.
The impressionists, whose work we now revere and pay tens of millions for, were originally shunned by the art world. Instead of slavishly adhering to the grammar of high art to create naturalistic images based on technical mastery, they instead explored how we perceive light and color, and by extension, the world and each other. They were banned from mainstream art shows, and had to start their own.
Cubists, whose images challenged us to see objects from multiple angles at the same time–like a precursor to metaverse stories!--combined scientific advances with art, and pushed our concept of perception. Surrealists borrowed ideas from burgeoning psychology research and created a response to wars and politicians of the early 20th century with similarly absurd work.
The camera reminded painters that the machine could do the recording and the human could do the seeing. In the same way, AI has reminded us of the difference between mechanical processes of learning from intellectual ones. So what do you value in school: mechanical processes and systems, or intellectual pursuits that are uniquely human like inquiry, originality, and problem-solving?
Change is always hard to imagine and implement. But if we’re clear on what we value, change becomes a design challenge rather than an existential threat.
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