tl;dr
My current guess is, “No, I don’t think so,” because schools don’t just teach content.
As the head of a school, this question has been on my mind lately. I don’t have a crystal ball, so I can’t back my views up with any more certainty than anyone else, but here are my thoughts on this topic.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is now good enough to act as a tutor on many subjects. And I believe we are only one or two years away (if that) from having an app that can deliver the full kindergarten to Grade 12 content that schools currently provide.
If schools were only a place for soaking up content, then this article would end here with the rather dire prediction that I and all of my colleagues in education will need to be looking for new careers in 2026.
However, “learning content” is just one activity that takes place at schools, and I would argue that it only represents a small portion of what students ACTUALLY learn at school. The rest, which is “learning through socialization”, is far more important, and it is not teachable by AI, but requires actual human interactions.
In certain professions, there are things you learn that are hidden to the rest of the world. You tend to develop a wider view of humanity based on the large expanse of examples of “ways of being” that you come into contact with in such a profession. I am certain that people who work in service industries, medical fields, policing, and local government understand this point well. Jobs that require you to come into contact with a large range of more or less random people — not just people who are similar to you and think like you do — can widen your perception and understanding of “normal”. You become able to see a wide range of ways that people see the world, how they interact with it, and how their thoughts and actions can have a huge impact on their lives.
I say this because, as someone who has worked in education for the past fifteen years, I have come into contact with a lot of different people with a lot of different ideas about how the world works. It was surprising to me at first, and I didn’t quite know how to process it. I would encounter people who had completely different ideas from my own, and yet, they would be getting along in the world just fine. But how could that be, when they were saying and doing things that I didn’t agree with, and didn’t believe would result in a successful path in life?
In the mission statement of the International Baccalaureate, it talks about how “other people, with their differences, can also be right”. This is what I am trying to get at here. There are so many different ways of knowing and ways of being, and yet our current obsession with binary thinking (e.g. good vs. evil, Democrat vs. Republican, Drake vs. Usher, etc.) forces us to believe in a kind of “us vs. them” world, where there is “common sense” that we all agree on, and that people who don’t think like we think are wrong, or even bad.
From the point of view of an educator, binary thinking is one of the most important areas of UNLEARNING that needs to be done in schools. And this is a clear example of something that can be TAUGHT either by AI or in a classroom setting, but, in my opinion, it can only be LEARNED in a social context where people have to interact with a varied group of people they are not related to.
AI gives us the opportunity to provide a stream of content at a pace that suits the learner. If content was all that children needed to learn in order to be functioning adults, then I would be working on my resume right now, not sitting here pontificating about the role of technology in education. But the content that you learn in school serves as a conduit for more important things — like understanding what to learn, how to learn, how to get along with people who are not like you, how to learn from others, etc. Once you leave formal education, you can easily take a course to catch up on any content that you missed. However, missing out on the opportunity to grow together with a learning community around you will certainly have an impact on your future — and the future of society — as you will not have had the experience of having to figure out how to get along with others and work toward a common goal. And, in my opinion, we don’t want to wait until people are in the workplace to start teaching them these things. Workplace leaders already have a hard enough job as it is without having to socialize the adults in their purview!
So, from my perspective as an educator, and as someone who has had a “big picture” perspective on children developing from three years of age to eighteen years of age over the past fifteen years, my opinion right now is that it is possible to replace schools entirely with AI, but that doing so would likely have a destabilizing impact on society as a whole, so I really hope it doesn’t happen.
What I do hope happens is that we use the strengths of AI, and what it is teaching us about the nature of learning, to strengthen K-12 education (and beyond), and make it fit better with how people actually learn. (Hint: Not in a linear, age-based, content-driven way.)
Of course, just because I hope AI won’t replace schools doesn’t mean that it won’t happen anyway. So, in case I’m wrong, maybe one of you can hire me based on one of my other skills? I could be a translator (nope, also AI), or a personal driver (nope, self-driving cars), or a librarian (okay, don’t even get me started on why a human librarian will always be better than computers, the internet, or yes, even AI!!!).
I wrote this back in 2024, but I didn’t publish it for some reason. I came across it in my drafts folder when I migrated my site and figured I would hit “publish” as it doesn’t seem to have aged too badly since then. Articles about AI tend to have a pretty short shelf-life, so I may have to revisit it again in the not-so-distant future. Let’s see.
