Is It Possible to Be Educated Purely by AI?

TLDR:
No—AI can’t replace it. Learning is full of emotion and requires curiosity, accountability, and intuitive questioning that only a real teacher’s connection provides. But it’s a powerful tool to be used.

No. At least not yet. But also, probably never. Core to the phenomenon of learning is the development of the person, one’s character, consciousness. Education shares much overlap with human development, and such progress is a deeply human experience. So naturally, the best guide on such a journey is a human, someone who understands the experience empirically. Plus, in its current state AI is still largely untrustworthy, infamous for giving horrifically inaccurate answers with a fool’s confidence. And while this will certainly improve in time, AI will forever chase the human touch. We are what it strives to emulate, and effectively all of its data is based on our own human experiences. On the other hand, AI is undeniably an extremely valuable tool, nearly bottomless in potential, and when properly applied can accelerate development and enhance the learning experience. Now then, if it’s so powerful, why isn’t it possible to be educated purely by AI?

The first point to be addressed is curriculum. It’s the foundation of the entire learning experience, the carefully curated path along which the teacher will guide the student toward a desired outcome (growth, development, understanding). What level of quality might we expect from curriculum made by solely by AI? Well, it’s currently prone to nonsense mistakes. And while it may perhaps be able to sequence topics sensibly, maybe even create respectable worksheets and exercises, there’s no way AI can capture authentic human curiosity. Definitely not the curiosity of a child. Yet it is around the children’s curiosity that the best curriculum is molded, and with great pain. This is because to create the best curriculum, lesson 2 can only be crafted based upon the delivery of lesson 1 and the feedback received from the students. This information tells the curriculum’s author where to speed up, slow down, fill in gaps, and go next. Then of course lesson 3 can’t be created until lesson 2 has been delivered, and thus the curriculum’s author can never escape the relentless pressure of a deadline. But the potency of such curriculum is well worth the trouble. And if that curriculum were refined every summer based on student feedback over the school year, imagine the potency that can be achieved. How would AI refine its curriculum year after year? The best feedback comes from honest, relatively passive conversations with students during down times. Or if relationships are especially strong, during delivery of the lesson itself.

The next matter to be addressed is twofold: discipline and accountability, two curiously human challenges. The average child doesn’t have the degree of discipline required to wake up every day and independently do their work to a high standard. A good teacher expects the best from their students and gets the most out of them by holding them accountable for poor or missing work, and by calling out and acknowledging the student’s good work even more. This recognition of the student’s effort stirs them and motivates them to do it again. Students typically don’t have the ability to push themselves past their limits, which is where they grow, nor do they typically notice when they’re slipping and put themselves back on track. This is again where a good teacher’s influence can produce leaps of progress or get a kid out of a rut, and it’s all based on feelings. Why are you in a rut? How are you feeling? The human touch. Now of course, AI is adaptive, and to a degree can increase or decrease difficulty to suit the student, maybe even tailor itself to the user’s personality, but not as keenly as a good teacher. Stretching a kid beyond their limits to expand their zone of competence is an especially emotional experience, and the teacher-student relationship is the platform for that noble work. AI can’t empathize or sympathize, it can’t share of its own personal experiences to relate to the student or inspire or encourage them. This is an effect of a human-to-human connection.

Now then, one of the most consequential limitations of being educated purely by AI is that we don’t know what we don’t know. It’s the question that enlightens. The best teacher perceives the student seeking something then asks just the right question, one that stimulates the student’s mind to discover a truth for itself. It’s nearly impossible to ask ourselves such a question, especially when learning something unfamiliar, and such an ad hoc phenomenon can’t really be woven into curriculum either. But if the question never crosses our mind, then that realm of knowledge may remain dark to us – we won’t even know it exists. This is where a human surpasses AI: a good teacher can sense such an opportunity in a child as it arises in the moment, then ask the right question, in the right way, at the right time. A good teacher can turn a student on to something new and exciting, something novel that totally resonates with them, and which may even influence a portion of the student’s future. And a good teacher’s ability to perform such an act is based essentially on intuition, on an acumen sharpened by many years working with young minds, and on a genuine understanding of the student as a person. This is all rooted in feeling. The human touch is emotion, which a machine could at best attempt to mimic poorly.

Learning is a profoundly personal experience. It is the development and organization of our inner world, the crafting of the lens through which we will view our life’s experiences and upon which our perceptions of reality will be based. And this entire process is thoroughly infused with feeling. Feeling is what drives the vast majority of human activity: we do things, we buy things, we learn things, we seek things because of the way we believe they will make us feel. Learning too is filled with emotion like the excitement before a fun lab, the nervous anticipation before a math test, and the personal satisfaction and gratification of performing well and scoring high. Not to mention the beautiful rapport cultivated in the classroom by a good teacher, the inside jokes that develop, the laughter throughout the learning process. The friends and memories we make. Feelings of emotional safety also bear mentioning because they empower a student to take intellectual risks, which in turn propel the student to the next level and embolden others to do the same. This is all based on emotion. AI is undoubtedly a powerful tool whose capabilities should be harnessed for universal benefit, but learning is a human experience and should ultimately be led by another human being to produce the best effects.