With the advance of technologies, it is becoming increasingly common for people to believe that the role of educators is losing its value. While some people may argue in favor because of several reasons, I oppose this notion since the purpose of teaching plays a key role regardless of any developments.
Perhaps, proponents of this view may state that the current technological advancements already display a predisposed replacement of teachers. This statement can be concluded due to the groundbreaking improvements in Artificial Intelligence, which promise a great assistance to learners during their education period. Even nowadays, AI, such as ChatGPT or DeepSeek, is being largely used to solve equations, present feedback, and review progress by many students all over the world. These mundane but crucial actions already raise the possibility of replacing educators, making people believe that the education in upcoming future can be based individually on the support of AI.
However, a number of important aspects of learning and teaching are being neglected with the view. Some of these major factors entail authentic human connection, professional judgement, and mentorship that only mentors can provide. AI is known to be able to help students with most of the assignments, but this support can be seen as only a sort of cheating and display of ready answers without accurate explanation or relevant guide. In addition, the human interaction can help students to catch the content or explanation much better rather than forced learning of structures and unnatural insights provided by the AI. This way, competent and research-driven teachers are not going to be replaced by AI. Instead, they can make use of it and other technological developments, like enhanced classroom equipment, to accelerate the progress of education. For instance, they can use AI to generate draft lesson plans, which usually take several hours to prepare before the lessons, aligned with standards, suggest differentiated activities for students at different skill levels, and organize digital sources for increase in convenience. Although these can substantially boost the velocity and simplicity of studying process, they still require a teacher’s review for appropriateness, accuracy and insights.
In conclusion, even though the advancement of technologies is not likely to eliminate the teachers’ occupation, I believe that it can benefit the education process via providing support, with particular mundane tasks, to mentors globally.