Teachers Are Irreplaceable

My dad got a perfect 1600 on the SAT, and growing up my mom always told us he was the smartest person in the world. Then one day she watched an interview with Bill Gates and said, “I think Bill Gates might be a little bit smarter than Hugh.”

Bill Gates is obviously very good at building software and companies. But guys like him, who live inside the tech world all day, can get so wrapped up in the AI hype echo chamber that it warps their sense of reality.

Case in point: in a recent interview, Gates said that within ten years, AI will replace doctors (yeah right, let’s see ChatGPT conduct a spinal surgery) and teachers.

Let’s start with an obvious question: who even wants that?

Remember that scene from Wall-E where the robots are teaching babies on screens? Is that really the future we are rooting for? I do not know a single parent or student who hears “no more human teachers, just screens” and says, “yes, sign me up.”

And even if someone did want that, it just is not realistic. The idea that AI will fully replace teachers tells me that a lot of tech folks do not understand what good teaching or tutoring actually is.

If teaching were only about conveying information, Bill Gates would have a point. Large language models are good at explaining things. Yes, they occasionally get it hilariously wrong, but I will admit, most of the time they do a decent job answering questions clearly, letting you ask follow-ups, and putting information into simple language.

But here is the problem: we already tried the “content without human teachers” experiment during COVID.

From 2020 onward, we ran a giant global test of what happens when you replace in-person schooling with screens, asynchronous modules, and video lessons. The results, predictably, demonstrated this as a massive failure. A 2023 systematic review of 24 studies found that overall academic performance dropped during lockdowns, with lower scores in core subjects compared to previous years. Academic, motivational, and social-emotional factors all contributed to the decline. A separate meta-analysis of 39 studies from 19 countries found that the pandemic had a clear negative effect on student achievement, especially in math and science, and that students had still not fully recovered from the initial learning loss even a year later.

It was not just grades. Reviews of students’ own experiences with online learning during COVID found that motivation and task engagement dropped, and many students simply felt more passive, distracted, and disconnected from their learning. In other words, pointing a young person at a screen and saying “learn” is not the same thing as education.

So why not? Why can’t AI be the sole “teacher” for our kids?

Because so much of real teaching and tutoring is fundamentally human.

AI can generate content, but it cannot build a deep, trusting relationship with a student. It cannot read the look on a kid’s face and realize that rather than being confused about factoring, they are embarrassed because they feel “stupid” and are shutting down. It cannot notice that one quiet student has not spoken in three classes and gently draw them back into the group.

A big body of research backs up what every good teacher already knows from experience: relationships and emotional support matter. Studies on social and emotional learning have shown that when teachers create caring, supportive classroom environments and build strong teacher-student relationships, students are more engaged, more persistent, and achieve more academically. Recent work even shows that teacher emotional support predicts students’ classroom engagement partly because it builds their resilience and sense of self-efficacy. That is central to whether kids actually show up mentally and learn anything.

AI also cannot get to know all the little nuances of a specific student and adapt in real time. A good tutor learns that this kid needs a little competition to get fired up, that kid needs calm reassurance, and this other one needs you to call them out when they are clearly phoning it in. That judgment is based on dozens of tiny cues in body language, tone, history, and context.

AI cannot serve as a role model or a living example in the room either. Kids learn as much from watching how adults handle stress, conflict, and failure as they do from the lesson plan. They are quietly studying your integrity, your work ethic, and how you talk about other people. You cannot outsource that to an app.

On top of that, teachers do not just drill content. The best ones foster critical thinking, curiosity, and creativity. They teach kids how to argue respectfully, how to ask better questions, how to struggle with something hard without giving up. They help students grow as whole people. Anyone who has actually taught or tutored knows that cannot be done by a robot.

Here is the ironic part. If you look at the research, the education intervention that comes closest to feeling like a “superpower” is not some fancy new software. It is old-fashioned human tutoring.

Back in the 1980s, educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that students who received one-to-one tutoring with mastery learning performed about two standard deviations better than students in a conventional classroom. In plain English, the average tutored student did better than about 98 percent of students in the regular class. That is an enormous effect in education research.

More recent work on high-dosage tutoring tells a similar story. Programs where students work regularly with a human tutor, often several times a week, have produced sizable gains in math achievement, with effect sizes around 0.3 to 0.4 standard deviations in some studies, especially for younger or struggling students. Even online human tutoring during and after the pandemic has been shown to improve math performance when students get a few hours of consistent, individualized support each week.

Put all that together, and the pattern is clear. The closer we get to consistent, individualized, human attention, the better kids tend to do. The more we strip away human connection and rely purely on asynchronous content, the more motivation, engagement, and learning suffer.

So when someone says “AI is going to replace teachers,” what they are really saying is “we should get rid of the part of schooling that all the evidence tells us is most powerful.”

AI cannot look at a student and say, “I know this feels impossible right now, but I am not going anywhere. We will work through this together.” It cannot build a culture of trust and high expectations in a classroom. It cannot mediate a conflict between two students who have history with each other. It cannot sit with a teenager who just bombed a test and help them see that this moment does not define them.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about AI-resistant skills, the things that stay valuable no matter how advanced the technology gets: deep reading and writing, numeracy, critical thinking, communication, leadership, emotional intelligence, the ability to work with other humans. Those are the muscles that help students stand out in admissions, succeed in college, and build meaningful careers in a world where AI is everywhere.

And those are exactly the muscles that good teachers and tutors help students build.

So to Bill Gates and any others pushing this idea of no longer needing teachers: take a breath.

Large language models are extraordinary inventions with huge potential to change our day to day lives. I am excited about a lot of that. But they are not going to replace what it means to be human, and they are not going to replace the messy, relational, soul-shaping work that great teachers and tutors do.

If anything, the research points in the opposite direction. The future of learning that actually works looks less like rows of kids on screens and more like rich human relationships, supported by smart tools in the background.

That is what gives me hope. If you are a teacher or tutor, your job is not about to disappear. It is evolving, but the parts that make you irreplaceable are the parts AI simply cannot do. And if you are a parent or a student who feels overwhelmed by all the AI headlines, remember this: the most important work in education is still happening in real conversations between real people.