In the age of AI, the teacher still matters most

Every year on 5 October, World Teachers' Day gives us a reason to think about the people who stood in front of a classroom and taught us something that stayed with us long after the lesson ended.

This year, though, the question feels slightly different. With ChatGPT, Gemini and countless other AI tools able to explain almost anything within seconds, what exactly do we still need a teacher for?

Perhaps the answer lies in what a teacher notices that a machine cannot.

A chatbot can explain photosynthesis, solve an equation or summarise a difficult book. But it cannot see the student sitting quietly at the back of the classroom and realise that something is wrong. It cannot always tell whether a child who keeps getting an answer wrong is struggling with the lesson or simply afraid of getting it wrong in front of everyone else.

A teacher can.

Most of us probably remember very little of what we were taught word for word. We forget formulas, dates and definitions. What tends to stay is something less tangible: the teacher who stayed behind after class to explain something again; the one who encouraged us when we were ready to give up; the person who recognised an ability in us before we had the confidence to recognise it ourselves.

Those moments rarely make it into a textbook. Yet they can change the way a student sees learning, and sometimes the way they see themselves.

That does not mean we should be suspicious of AI. Quite the opposite. For a curious student, an AI tool can be an extraordinarily useful companion. It can explain a difficult idea in several different ways, create questions for practice, help with a language exercise or patiently go over something that did not make sense the first time.

For students who do not have access to private tutors or coaching centres, that access can be particularly valuable. A student in a village with nothing more than a phone can now ask questions that might once have required travelling to a city or paying for extra classes.

But access to information is not the same thing as an education.

Perhaps the most useful role for AI in a classroom is not to replace the teacher, but to give the teacher more room to be a teacher.

Let technology handle some of the repetitive work. Let it provide extra exercises or explanations for students who need them. Let it be available when a question occurs at midnight and there is no teacher around to answer it.

But let the teacher remain the person who helps students make sense of what they are learning, connects ideas to the world around them and, importantly, teaches them how to question what they are told.

That last part has become more important, not less.

AI can produce an answer that sounds convincing and is completely wrong. Students therefore need to learn more than how to use these tools. They need to learn how to recognise when something does not add up, check a claim, challenge an assumption and admit when they do not know.

There is a temptation, especially among students under pressure, to use AI as a shortcut. Why struggle through an essay when a machine can write one in seconds? Why work through a difficult problem when an answer is immediately available?

But some of the struggle is the point.

Learning does not always feel efficient. Sometimes it means sitting with a difficult paragraph until it finally makes sense, getting a problem wrong several times, or writing a first draft that is far worse than the one you eventually produce. That effort is part of how knowledge becomes our own.

AI can make that process easier. It should not make the process disappear.

Teachers, meanwhile, are having to learn all this alongside their students. Many are experimenting with new tools, rethinking assignments and finding ways to teach students to question AI-generated answers rather than simply accept them.

They are doing so while dealing with problems that technology cannot solve: crowded classrooms, limited resources, demanding workloads and, in many places, inadequate pay and recognition.

If AI can genuinely reduce some of the administrative burden on teachers, that could be one of its greatest contributions to education. The time saved on routine tasks could instead be spent talking to students, giving feedback, mentoring them or simply noticing when one of them needs help.

But that will require investment in teachers, not just investment in technology. Better training, fair pay and greater respect for the profession have to be part of the conversation about the future of education.

On World Teachers' Day, it is worth remembering that education has never been only about getting the right answer or whether teachers can compete with AI. They do not need to.

A machine can give us an answer, but education has always been about more than answers. It is about learning how to think, how to keep going when something is difficult, and how to become curious enough to look beyond what is already known.

The tools in our classrooms will change. The people who use them will change with them. But a student will still need someone who can recognise a spark of curiosity, take a struggling student seriously, or offer encouragement at exactly the moment it is needed.

That is the part of teaching technology cannot take away. And perhaps that is why, even in an age when information is available at the tap of a screen, a good teacher remains one of the most important things a student can have.