The role of AI as personal tutors and teachers?

A few months ago, I noticed my nephew asking an AI chatbot to explain fractions. The answer came instantly. When the child looked confused, the chatbot explained it again, this time using a pizza. Then it tried chocolates. Then it used football teams. It never became impatient. It never said, “We’ve already covered this.”

As an educator, I couldn’t help thinking, What a remarkable learning tool.

But I also asked myself another question.

If children always have someone ready to think for them, will they still learn how to think for themselves?

Artificial intelligence is changing education faster than any technology before it. For the first time in history, almost every child can have access to something that looks very much like a personal tutor. That is extraordinary. For decades, educators have known that one-to-one tutoring produces better learning. Benjamin Bloom’s famous 2-sigma problem showed that students who received individual tutoring performed significantly better than those taught only in traditional classrooms. The difficulty was never proving that tutoring worked. The difficulty was making it affordable.

AI has changed that. 

Today, a child can ask a question at ten o’clock at night and receive an explanation in seconds. If the explanation is too difficult, AI can simplify it. If the child still doesn’t understand, it can try again. There is no embarrassment, no fear of asking “stupid” questions, and no pressure to keep up with the rest of the class.

For many children, especially those who lack access to private tutors, this is a wonderful opportunity.

But schools have never existed simply to provide answers.

In more than twenty years of working with children, I have realized that learning is rarely the biggest challenge. Understanding the child is.

Sometimes a student who keeps making mistakes is not weak in mathematics. He may be worried about problems at home. Sometimes the quiet child at the back of the classroom is not shy. She has simply lost confidence after failing a few tests. Sometimes the child who keeps interrupting the lesson isn’t being difficult at all. He is asking for attention in the only way he knows.

I refuse to believe that artificial intelligence can truly see those things.

A teacher notices the child who suddenly becomes silent. A teacher knows when a smile is forced, when frustration is turning into anxiety, or when a bright student has quietly given up. These are moments no software can measure.

There is another concern that worries me even more.

Psychologists call it cognitive offloading. It sounds technical, but the idea is simple. Instead of using our own minds, we let technology do the thinking for us. 

We ask AI to summarize the chapter rather than read it ourselves. We let it solve the maths problem before we’ve even tried. We copy an essay that we never planned, never questioned, and never truly understood.

The assignment gets completed. The learning doesn’t happen.

As educators, we should not fear AI. We should fear passive learning and cognitive offloading. 

Our responsibility is to teach children how to use AI wisely. Don’t ask it to write your homework. Ask it to explain why your answer is wrong. Don’t let it replace your reading. Let it test your understanding. Ask it difficult questions. Let it challenge your thinking instead of doing the thinking for you.

Like most powerful inventions, AI is neither good nor bad. A library can educate a child, but only if the child chooses to read. A calculator can save time, but only after the student understands the mathematics. AI is no different. It is a tool. Nothing more. Nothing less.

The future of education will not belong to the schools with the most advanced technology. It will belong to the schools that teach children something technology cannot, such as curiosity, judgment, and resilience.

And the confidence to struggle with a difficult problem before asking a machine for the answer. 

Children should certainly learn with artificial intelligence. They will need it in the world they are growing into.

But they must never stop learning without it. 

Because education has never been about producing children who know all the answers. It has always been about raising young people who know how to ask the right questions.