Cats are cute :D

The other day, I watched a young teacher in a remote school, chalk in one hand, a child’s sketch in the other. The electricity had been out since morning, the chalkboard was cracked, and yet, her eyes sparkled as she explained photosynthesis using the leaf a student had brought in. No smartboard. No AI. Just curiosity, care, and a human presence.

In this age of artificial intelligence, where algorithms can read essays, generate lessons, and predict student outcomes, a question hovers in the air — Can AI replace teachers?

It’s a fair question. After all, AI is fast. It’s efficient. It doesn’t need tea- breaks or carry the emotional load of a bad day. It can adapt lesson plans in real time, track every student’s progress, and even answer doubts at 2 AM. But when I think of that teacher with the leaf in her hand, I feel the weight of something else. Something deeper.

What AI can do, and does well

There’s no doubt that AI has entered classrooms through the back door and sometimes through the main gate. Personalized learning platforms, speech-to-text tools, and grading bots have quietly become a part of the school ecosystem.

AI can ease the burden of repetitive tasks. It can offer differentiated content to learners at different levels. It can assist children with disabilities and help those learning in a second language. These are not small things.

Used thoughtfully, AI can be a kind helper in the background — the extra hand that prepares the worksheet, the invisible assistant that flags a struggling reader. But it is a hand, not a heart.

What teaching truly demands

“Teaching, like any truly human activity, emerges from one’s inwardness.” — Parker J. Palmer

If this is true — and many of us who teach know it is — then we must ask: can a machine possess inwardness?

Teaching, at its core, is not about information transfer. It is about attention. Connection. Presence.

No AI, no matter how advanced, can read the quiet in a child’s eyes. It cannot offer quiet understanding to the boy whose father didn’t return last night. It cannot sense the courage it takes for a girl to raise her hand for the first time in weeks.

AI might know when a student got the answer wrong. A teacher knows why.

The acts no one sees

I once met a teacher who carried drinking water every morning from a nearby town because the village where she taught had no safe water source. It wasn’t in her job description. No one had asked her to. But she did it, quietly, every day, so her students wouldn’t go thirsty.

Another teacher, in a school far from the city’s noise, opened his doors weeks before the academic year began — not for planning, but for welcoming. His new students came from a marginalized, nomadic community and spoke a different language than the one used in school. He brought them in early so they could get used to the space, learn a few words, feel safe, laugh a little — so that when “school” officially started, it wouldn’t feel like an alien world.

What algorithm can carry water across kilometres? What machine can anticipate fear and respond with hospitality?

Learning is a Social Act

Decades ago, psychologist Lev Vygotsky reminded us that learning is inherently social. Children learn by observing others, by speaking aloud their thinking, by leaning into someone more experienced — a peer, a parent, a teacher — who gently guides them into the unfamiliar.

This zone of possibility, what Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development, isn’t charted by data alone. It’s shaped by dialogue, by trust, by shared meaning.

While AI offers personalization — pacing, levels, content — it risks pulling students further into isolation. No whisper from a peer. No classroom joke. No shared aha moment. Individualization, when disconnected from community, begins to feel like loneliness in disguise.

The risk of replacing presence with precision

We sometimes confuse precision for wisdom. AI is precise. It’s data-driven, logical, consistent. But wisdom lives in the grey — in uncertainty, in paradox, in moral messiness. Classrooms are filled with this grey.

According to a UNESCO report, AI systems trained far from the realities of students’ lives — particularly those in underserved communities — risk reinforcing systemic bias. And when we let data define success, we risk losing the voices that data fails to capture.

The deeper cost: forgetting why we teach

“The spirituality of education has little to do with institutions or dogma. It has everything to do with the way we make space for truth to emerge.” — Parker J. Palmer

If we hand over teaching to machines, we risk not only jobs — we risk the spirit of teaching itself.

AI can deliver content. But it cannot hold space. It cannot sit with uncertainty. It cannot celebrate the tearful breakthrough or make room for shared joy.

What holds the teacher in place

Many teachers carry the burden of low pay, little recognition, and relentless routine. And yet, they stay.

Why?

Because, as one teacher told me after a long day, “Sometimes, a child says something that shifts everything inside me. And I know — I still matter.” That knowing cannot be programmed. It emerges from the invisible alchemy between teacher and student. It is slow. It is sacred. And it is entirely human.

So perhaps the question isn’t Can AI replace teachers? Perhaps it is: What do we want education to be?

If education is about efficiency, then maybe machines will do. But if education is about becoming — about helping children become more thoughtful, more curious, more whole — then we need humans. Imperfect, feeling, responsive humans.

And maybe, just maybe, we need to protect that space — the slow, human classroom — not from failure, but from forgetting what made it beautiful in the first place.

References

• Parker J. Palmer, A Spirituality of Education — The Marginalian (2015)

• Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological

• Processes

• UNESCO (2023). AI and Education: Guidance for Policymakers

• Harvard GSE (2018). Teacher-Student Relationships