AI and the future of language/ all education: will teachers become obsolete? Or are they already?
by Maria Davou, teacher, teacher trainer, researcher, school owner, public speaker, storyteller, author, publisher, education visionary
A couple of weeks ago I was invited as a guest professor to an MA course on educational leadership. Students asked me several questions on the present and future of language education. At some point, I said one of my often repeated statements: if you teach mainly through exam prep, get ready to be replaced by an AI very soon.
One of the postgrad students felt offended by my answer. In fact, in my naïveté, I was talking about what has been already happening: self-correcting practice tests (offering not only correct answers but also detailed explanations etc). Little did I know about the real “risk” in sight, which does not only “threaten” exam prep classes and teachers teaching the test, but the whole of education as we know it!
Take a look at how chatGPT works and what it can already do.
Students can have meaningful discussions, access to critically analyzed and synthesized knowledge, paper writing and so much more.
Teachers can have access to lesson plans, activities, tasks, which are not just googleable, but well-thought out, principled, creative!
So is there a future for educators? Will we have a job 5 years from now?
I can’t give a valid answer but I’m thinking of what could possibly make our roles more meaningful- if at all necessary.
And no, it’s not “a robot can’t replace a teacher”. Because it can.
It’s about offering experiences that are beyond complex; experiences that are learner-led, unpredictable, bizarrely creative, emotion-driven, inherently unstructured, thought-provoking, interdisciplinary and even more, beyond the disciplines.
At the same time, new education has to be so learner-centered that the teacher basically becomes present in their absence.
So, put simply, what is the difference between a perfectly developed argument on a critical thinking related question produced by an AI, collecting and synthesizing knowledge from all possible sources and a human teacher with limited expertise in limited fields?
The only possible reason why the human answer can be better is if the human knows you and cares to make this answer meaningful to you, explained to you, shared for your intelligence to make sense out of it, connect to personal experiences that are memorable and cared for. But more than that, the human teacher might be smart enough (i.e. smarter than an AI) to initiate more questions for which there are no answers. And there lies the power of the human teacher: elicit a conversation on the not only unanswered but the unquestioned. Because there’s no feed for the question that hasn’t been asked yet.
Going back to the beginning of this article, the fellow teacher who got offended by my answer is already doing the job an AI can do better. The thing is if there’s anything we can do- besides dealing with hurt human egos…
PS. There’s one thing chatGPT cannot do- at least not yet: love.
Focus on Love.
Come away O human child / To the waters and the wild / With a fairy hand in hand / For the world’s more full of weeping / Than you can understand.
— Artficial Intelligence: A.I. (the film)
