Year 9 on a Wet Friday: The Real Test for AI in Education

The embodied dimensions of education that we neglect at our own peril

You may have seen a number of articles that state that Bill Gates said that AI will replace teachers. I was a little shocked, namely because it seemed a little gauche. Practising what I preach to students, I went to find the source of the quote which is an interview with Jimmy Fallon. You can watch it here. I've reproduced it below with slight edits for clarity and flow:

Gates: So, the era we've come to is sort of the vision that computing was expensive, and it basically became free. The era that we're just starting is that intelligence is rare. You know, a great doctor, a great teacher, and with AI, over the next decade, that will become free, commonplace. You know, great medical advice, great tutoring, and it's kind of profound, because it solves all these specific problems, like we don't have enough doctors or mental health professionals, but it brings with it kind of so much change, you know, what will jobs be like? Should we, you know, just work like two or three days a week? So I love the way it'll drive innovation forward, but I think, you know, it's a little bit unknown. Will we be able to shape it? And so legitimately, people like, wow, this is, this is a bit scary. It's completely new territory.

Fallon: I mean, we still need humans?

Gates: Not for most things. You know, we'll decide... like baseball, we won't want to watch computers play baseball, and you know, so there'll be some things that we reserve for ourselves.

Now, if you want to fit a preexisting narrative, you can use snippets to say that Gates said AI could replace teachers. My reading is that he implies that AI will do many functions of the job of a teacher. It is true that intelligence is rare, and that you can see that in the competition for the best qualified and experienced teachers, as they add significant value beyond a novice teacher. However, thinking that it will become 'free' is another matter. In the interview, Gates makes the point about computing becoming 'commonplace and free'. Well, computing is commonplace in comparison to the world Gates was in as a young student when it was the preserve of major corporations. We have phones, tablets, laptops and connected devices at home. Devices aren't free. Internet connection isn't free. AI services cost money, and even when you don't pay with money, your data is taken as payment for refinement of the product or stored for later use in search of new markets and services.

Conrad Hughes is an educator that I respect, and yet he falls into the narrative that Gates says AI will replace teachers and makes a defence suggesting that this would not be the case in primary/prep and middle schools due to essential human elements such as socialisation, emotional support and helping to scaffold learning. He also makes the argument that high school/senior school education is more easily replaced by AI as teaching is often reduced to 'test preparation'.

I have sympathy for his position, but I would argue that it relies on a limited and technical view of education at the high school/Senior School level.

Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I would argue that education is an embodied process, where knowledge is not simply transferred from teacher to student, but emerges through their physical presence and interaction in the classroom and outside of it. Education in this shared world means being attuned to gestures, eyebrow raises, voice modulation and physical expressions. Simply, there is a bodily intersubjectivity, a resonance, an intercorporeal dimension that occurs, regardless of the age of the student, despite it looking in a different way. Instead of physical touch, it may come about by asking how a student is, noticing that something is different and engaging in a conversation. It is fashioned in the encouragement of the teacher to help the student voice the words: 'I can' before they attempt a difficult task. For me (although this would be contentious), this is what a value-added score at secondary represents; it is a bodily subjective experience that transforms the reality of education for the student beyond the normal curve of distribution that the baseline scores (and they are also problematic) represent. In UK schools, value-added measures attempt to quantify a teacher's impact (but also the impact of the school) beyond what was statistically expected. However, these measures fail to capture the nuanced interpersonal dynamics that shape this progress.

This is why, although I respect the advocates who talk about educational research being important to the classroom, I am heavily sceptical when they talk of it being a panacea for all the issues we have. Teachers matter, not just as deliverers of curriculum, but as embodied co-creators of knowledge and the world in the shared space of the classroom.

Even in an online world, education is bodily-subjective. What is fascinating to me is that although there is an emphasis on the technology, the bodies of the learner and the teacher are not absent, they exist and become part of our digital incorporeality. There are still facial expressions, tones and digital gestures 'thumbs up', that create a shared world. For all the talk of AI tutors, it is interesting that there is marked interest in digital representations of teachers to interact with. While tools promise personalised feedback, they still lack the embodied presence that can read a classroom's energy. A known teacher trope is whether something would work with Y9 students on a wet/windy Friday afternoon even if they are not in school. I'll leave that to you to decide if you think a chatbot or AI teacher could resolve this issue.

AI will influence education in ways we are yet to work out. The important aspect for educators is that we have a choice, even a small one, in what it will look like. We have work to do.