My mom kept lots of artifacts from my childhood, and she recently gave a bunch of them to me. It was a lot of fun to go through old photos, programs from concerts, and examples of my schoolwork from the Days of Yore.
Among them, a composition notebook from 3rd grade, full of writing in my 9-year-old cursive. My kids laughed at the things I wrote, and I did too. Some really cute things in there! “If I had a Million Dollars,” “How I Helped Somebody,” “My New Years Resolutions,” and “My Big Whopper” are all worth the price of admission. But my favorite? “What Will Our School Be Like in 2035?” (For context, this was 1985, so we were imagining ahead 50 years into the future.) Check it out:
It’s a little hard to read, but here’s what I said:
What will our school be like in 50 years? We won’t sit at desks. We will wear clothes that make us float. We will have stands set up like desks. Books will be sheets of metal put together. Pencils will be little boxes with lead sticking out of them. No more pencils rolling off of desks! That way things won’t take up much space. At recess we will play space ball, jump wire, altitude, and play in the space ground. Teachers will be robots. School sure will be different!
I laughed and laughed as I read this, remembering how I much I loved space, and read science fiction, and dreamed of becoming an astronaut. (I wrote this piece just a few months before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in January of 1986—it was in the zeitgeist.) And with my Jetsons-inspired view of the future is on obvious display here…that phrase Teachers will be robots leaped off the page to me. It sort of seems like technology in education was part of my imagination even in elementary school!
While this is cute—to me, at least—it has me thinking about something else I read recently. There is a charter school starting up in Arizona that advertises just two hours of school each day, and AI tutors offering adaptive learning. You can check out this report of the school for yourself: AI educators are coming to this school – and it's part of a trend.
Now, this caught my attention because there is a very particular view of what it means to become educated being purported in this model. I’m no luddite, but I have some pretty profound concerns about this vision of education. AI-powered adaptive learning may have some potential, and I’m curious to see how things evolve in that area over the next few years. But to suggest that you could replace a teacher with an AI agent? Hmmm. It seems to me that this suggests a view of teaching and learning as information transfer.
But I think a real education must be more than simply a transfer of information. After all, with the World Wide Web at our fingertips, the information is out there, for free. You can find all the information you want! But would you be excited to replace your child’s teacher with Wikipedia? I suspect not.
So what’s the value of education? I would rather think of the interaction between teachers and students as being at least a little more interactive, and formative, and relational. This reminds me of a graphic I saw on Twitter a decade or so ago, and saved to my files. I think this is true:
What do you all think? Can we truly replace teachers with an AI agent? Or is there still something human beings bring to the work of teaching that cannot be replaced by devices and software?
Dave’s Faves
Here are three things I’m absolutely loving right now that I hope you might love too…
Dave’s Fave #1: Guesting on other people’s podcasts!
My friend, Dr. Jared Pyles, is a fellow grad of Boise State University’s Ed.D. program in Educational Technology. (Go Broncos!) He and one of his colleagues at Cedarville University host a podcast entitled Transform Your Teaching. Jared asked me to join them for a conversation about generative AI (that is, AI chatbots, like ChatGPT) in education, and in particular what an ethical approach to using AI might look like. It was a fun conversation, and you can listen in here: Defining Ethical Usage of GAI in Higher Education.
Dave’s Fave #2: James, by Percival Everett
If you follow me on Instagram (@drdavemulder), you’ll already know that I share short reviews of the books I’m reading over there. My first book of 2025 was James by Percival Everett. It’s a fantastic read, and I highly recommend it! Here was my Instagram review:
My first read of 2025: James, by Percival Everett. If you ever had to read Huckleberry Finn in a literature class, you owe it to yourself to read this book! This is the untold story of Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck on his adventures down the Mississippi River, but related from Jim’s perspective. All of the crazy events from Mark Twain’s novel (remember the King and the Duke?) are explored from the perspective of someone who was enslaved, which was a fascinating take compared to Twain’s novel. The final half of the book is Everett’s own invention, and while it definitely takes a darker turn compared to the hijinks of the Twain-inspired section, it is a compelling, if harrowing tale that I won’t spoil for you at all. Suffice to say, I highly recommend this one to you!
The most intriguing part for me was the way the author (a black man himself) gives insight into the cultural norms of slavery and how they would have been perceived by an enslaved person in that time and place. This book expanded my whole imagination of slavery in a way I haven’t experienced since watching the film Glory in the mid-90s. I’m continuing on my journey of learning.
Dave’s Fave #3: Jars of Clay
There are only a few bands where I think I own every single album they released. Jars of Clay is one of those bands. (There might be one album that I never bought the CD for, now that I’m thinking about it.) But my favorite album of theirs? Their self-titled debut from 1995. If you haven’t listened to this one lately, check it out and see if it holds up. And if you’ve never listened, well…it’s high time that you should! “Flood” and “Liquid” were their radio hits from this album, but if I can make a recommendation, check out track #5 (“Art In Me”) which is one of the best expressions of what it means to be created in God’s image, and track #9 (“Worlds Apart”) which is a cry of faith that still makes me tear up when I play it, 30 years later.
The Last Word!
As I was scrolling through the images I have saved on my computer, I came across one more that is germane to the topic of this edition. It’s a quote from EdTech researcher, Sugata Mitra who once conducted a fascinating experiment in a slum in New Delhi, India called the “hole in the wall” experiment. In a nutshell: he put a computer behind a piece of plexiglass in a literal hole in a wall with access to the keyboard and a trackball. Kids in the neighborhood who had never used a computer, let alone the World Wide Web quickly worked together to figure out how it worked, how to access the Internet, and then how to do all sorts of things through this knowledge. It’s an absolutely fascinating case study for collective learning and the power of authentic collaboration. He tells the story of what he did and what he discovered in a classic TEDTalk, which you can view here, if you like: Kids Can Teach Themselves.
In response to the hole in the wall experiment, here is the quote from Mitra that still that resonates with me…
If a teacher can be replaced by a computer…how much of a teacher is that anyway? Is Mitra onto something here? What do you think?
That's hilarious! "Teachers will be robots." Your writing was somewhat prophetic considering the advent of artificial intelligence. How true your comment that formal education involves significantly more than transferring information. I made a similar observation in "What a Teacher Can Add that Google Can't" (In All Things, 2016). Thanks for reminding us, Dave, not only about our worth as teachers, but also our call to humanize teaching and learning.
https://inallthings.org/what-a-teacher-can-add-that-google-cant/
Your post reminds me of the robotic teaching I sometimes observed in student teachers who are told to follow a company curriculum script for teaching language arts or math. Honestly, this kind of teaching could better be done through a polished video than a human following a script. Note: I think that scripts can be really helpful. But if the teaching is not responsive to the responses of the students (even just the looks on their faces of comprehension or confusion), a key element in the teaching-learning exchange goes missing.