What’s the purpose of “school” when your personal AI Is the Best Teacher on Earth?
What happens to school when every child has an infinitely patient tutor — one with PhD-level expertise across every subject, fluent in pedagogy, psychology, and TikTok — on their tablet?
Every child’s personal on-device AI will know and understand the child intimately, at a level no human teacher could ever imagine. Once we have on-device AI (when Apple or Android or OpenAI effectively build AI into the operating system), it will be involved in every aspect of our lives.
With prior concent, it will read all of the child’s emails and text messages, listen in on all of their personal conversations at home and with friends, monitor the YouTubes they watch, the TikToks and podcasts they listen to, the books they read (assuming kids still read), the TV shows and films they watch – and, of course, what they talk to their AI about (which is already replacing the Google search).
Their AI will know what medication they are on, what their diet and exercise habits are, and where their dreams, hopes, fears and anxieties lie.
And if you’re thinking “oh I’d never let my kid’s AI do all of that” – YES, YOU WILL. You will want to, because it will keep an eye on your child’s mental health in ways you can’t hope to, and it will alert you if you should be concerned about how (and what) they are doing. Anyway…. back to school.
Of course, teaching is more than just imparting information. The best teachers are mentors, role models, catalysts. Let’s be honest though: most classrooms fall far short of that ideal. And even the best teachers are going to struggle to compete with the AI that knows everything about each and every student. It will deeply understand their preferred learning modalities and will be able to customise every lesson to suit each child perfectly. Can your best teacher do that today?
Look – I’m not suggesting schools go away when we have advanced AI. As a parent, I’m very happy to send my child somewhere else during the week. And he loves to go to school, too. But I also don’t think schools won’t change. They will have to change. A LOT. And quite soon. Think about it:
What does “school” become when the AI on your kid’s phone becomes the best teacher who’s ever lived — on every topic? What will be the role of the human teacher? Or the principal? The Department of Education?
If the role of introducing and explaining new concepts, and revising old ones, is done by an AI avatar on a screen, as well as the marking of tests, the psych report, career counselling, “additional needs” assistance – what, exactly, is left for humans in the process?
And if you don’t think AI can teach children effectively, think again. It seems that early studies already show AI tutors beating traditional classrooms on test scores and motivation.
Stanford found that “when students interact with our AI tutor, at home, on their own, they learn significantly more than when they engage with the same content during an in-class active learning lesson, while spending less time on task…. 83% of students reported that the AI tutor’s explanations were as good as, or better than, those from human instructors in the class.“
Where will AI tutors be a few years from now?
So what’s left? I suspect the school of the future will keep people around for three harder jobs.
- Relational navigation. Teenagers still map their identity through human relationships. AI can flag self-harm; but it can’t walk a trembling student to the counsellor or file the report that proves duty of care. Not until we have humanoid robots, that is.
- Responsible oversight. When a Gaza argument spills into English class, someone with a badge needs to decide whether to intervene, escalate, or debrief. You can’t AI your way through parent calls or locker room fights. The chemistry lab and the woodworking class will still need human oversight (again, until the humanoid robots become viable).
- Meaning and Purpose. Our children are about to find themselves living in a world that differs as much from the one their parents grew up in, as their parents’ world was from the one pre-industrial revolution. It’ll be a world where advanced AI and humanoid robots can and will do most of the jobs that humans used to do. What will the role of humans be in that world? What will they do for work? For pleasure? For meaning? These are questions that adult humans will hopefully be able to help them navigate – or, at worst, jointly worry about and commisserate with them over.
- Human Authority. Students prefer AI explanations — until they find out the voice behind them is synthetic. Another Stanford study found that:
“… students generally preferred AI and co-produced feedback over human feedback in terms of perceived usefulness and objectivity. Only AI feedback suffered a decline in perceived genuineness when feedback sources were revealed, while co-produced feedback maintained its positive perception.”
That said, I suspect that the trust issues will go away over time, as AI becomes more reliable and the hallucination issues have been largely resolved. I remember when most people said they would never use their credit card online, too.
But here’s the catch: most teachers aren’t hired to be wellbeing professionals or WHS marshals who know when to pull the plug on a sparking 3D printer. The person who stands in the front of the classroom and explains things? I think that job description is going to disappear quite soon.
Kids will need a human chaperone. But does that require a teaching degree?
Private Prestige, Public Pressure
In 2023, Brisbane Grammar took in $53 million from tuition, boarding, and enrolment fees — most of it justified by superior academic outcomes.
But when explanation is free, that premium vanishes. Families might still pay — but not for test prep, instead for elite coaching, religious indoctrination, networking with the next police chief’s son.
Public systems might have less budget to teachers and instead invest in more bandwidth, devices, or AI licenses. Everyone else is a fancy babysitter.
What We Still Call School
Kids will still want to hang out with their friends and peers. They will still need guidance from human adults. But will we think of this as a “school”?
Swap rows of desks for comfortable sofas. Kids spending most of the day looking at their own devices with headphones on. Forget “teachers” — think counsellors, navigators, raconteurs.
Unlimited intelligence will turn knowledge, and the skill of teaching, into non-scarce goods. What’s still scarce — and therefore still valuable — is guidance in how to live in a world where humans struggle to find meaning and a career.
Until a machine can be sued, trusted, and admired all at once, that guidance stays human.
We may keep calling it a “school.” Or maybe it becomes something else: a youth commons, a civic node, a coming-of-age infrastructure.
Same building. Different function.
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