The most ardent defenders of AI in education will concede the following: while teachers could relinquish to AI the role of imparting knowledge to students, they are nonetheless needed as guides in the learning process. The problem with this line of reasoning, including the few cases when it’s well-intentioned, is that it presupposes that imparting knowledge as such has been the principal role of teachers in the first place; and that absent this vocation-defining role, their highest consolation is to conduct an ensemble of algorithms far more capable of this role than they are.
If it’s not the imparting of knowledge that is the forte of teachers, at least not in the mechanistic way in which they are ostensibly superseded by algorithms, nor is it, as I’m claiming, any of the managerial, jargon-heavy roles that advocates of AI want to relegate them to (guiding? supervising? facilitating?), then what is it that teachers do?
Invoking metaphysical aspects of teaching that are assumed to be the sole purview of humans, like the notion of teachers as role models of virtue and good behavior, reduces the complexity of teaching to a cliché—portraying exemplary teachers not as educators but as makeshift parents or caregivers. In my experience, teachers can function as role models, but what they model most effectively isn’t virtue or prosocial behavior.
It was a given, in the years that I went to school, that students should regard their teachers as paragons of virtue. As a student in the Arabic-speaking world, I used to see the ubiquitous opening verse of Ahmed Shawqi’s Ode to the Teacher on an almost daily basis. In those years, it could be found framed in teachers’ lounges, on placards in the school’s hallways and classrooms, or at the gates of the school itself:
Stand for the teacher, give him full respect.
The teacher's rank is close to the prophet.
As good and virtuous as some of our teachers seemed to be, it was only natural for us students to disregard the sentimentality. Our sense of irony, sharpened by television and GTA, supplanted the old-world innocence of our parents—we would not take that schmaltz at face value. We regarded teacher reverence as an instrument of discipline, and we rebelled against it every chance we got. (Even yours truly, a bona fide teacher’s pet, occasionally rebelled... in spirit.)
It didn’t help with student compliance that the social attitude towards teachers was patently hollow. Authority figures, like parents, religious leaders, politicians, and teachers themselves, never tired of telling you to honor thy teacher, but you could easily see that teachers were wanting in actual respect from other adults and in social standing. The clearest evidence of this hypocrisy was that your parents wanted you to worship your teachers but rarely to become one yourself. (This was especially true in the socioeconomic stratum I grew up in, where technocratic jobs of much higher prestige and remuneration than teaching were seen as the more appropriate vehicles for upward social mobility, but I think the point stands WLOG.) The hypocrisy and the sentimentality, in my opinion, stem from the same general misunderstanding, which might be intentional, of the true power of teachers.
I recall an incident from math class at the beginning of the academic year in 9th or 10th grade. It was customary for a teacher to begin the year by breaking down how grades will be allocated in his subject. This typically followed a formula, for example: exams 50%, quizzes 20%, assignments 10%, class participation 15%, and finally, the odd category of behavior, 5%. The latter was a nominal allotment which every student received in full (apart from the few cases of abnormally misbehaving and low-performing students, whose penalization itself was a formality: come time for the parent-teacher meeting, when the stressed, beleaguered, and often incensed parent asks why their kid failed the subject, the teacher can point down to the grades chart and say, look, besides how poorly your kid did on tests, they also got a zero in behavior: there’s nothing I can do).
This math teacher had other plans. He gave a breakdown that added up to a hundred without the nominal 5% for behavior. We did not like this. We were being cheated out of our freebie. The designated class clown—the bright-eyed, cleft-lipped, and fat boy who shared my first name–felt the immediate pressure from the class, a sub-audible rabble goading him to protest on its behalf, and he duly obliged: “But sir,” he said, after raising his hand and getting permission to speak, “you forgot about good behavior.” Without a moment’s hesitation, and barely raising his head from his notes, the teacher responded in a stern but calm manner, loud enough so that even the jackals in the back of the room could hear him, “My job here is to teach you math, not manners... Besides, in my class, you will behave yourself whether you like it or not.” Knowing full well the kind of school he was in, and the hormonal soup gone rancid that room of teenaged delinquents contained, the subtext of his response was clear: “Go ahead. Try me.”
Needless to say, none of us tried him, not on that day, nor on any other occasion in the two years that he taught us math. Even the class clown was stumped, and I for one was in awe of the Joe Pesci-grade wit that our teacher had just served up. In my opinion, he was right: a math teacher’s duty is to teach math. Aside from the irony that what he did that day was itself a masterclass in teaching manners and discipline, he mostly stuck to that principle and taught us math in a way that many might consider impersonal—and he did so with competence. He never tried to be anyone’s friend or “mentor”–imagine if Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in Dangerous Minds were played by Liam Neeson–in fact, one could argue that any half-decent AI agent could display more “character”, which the student or parent could tune to their liking, than the breed of human teacher that man belonged to. Yet, his influence on me personally was immense. He was, in his capacity as a teacher of mathematics, a role model.
Edsger W. Dijkstra, an old-guard computer scientist, explains the kind of role modeling that underlies my claim. He recalls in a 1983 essay his experience as a student learning to read Classical Greek poetry. (Incidentally, the occasion of this recollection was his arguing against the computerization of classrooms and in favor of flesh-and-blood teachers, which, if anything, shows that the tension between teachers and teaching technologies is nothing new):
“During my last year in high school, I would regularly read a few hundred verses of Homer’s poetry before going to sleep, looking up the few words I had missed the next morning. It is a habit I can genuinely recommend for the restless mind. The ability to read Homer without a dictionary and to enjoy it greatly turned out to be extremely volatile: I went to University where I was otherwise engaged and within six months I had lost the ability completely. In a highly knowledge-oriented world, my study of Classical Greek should probably be regarded as a waste of time, but I don’t do so. If I close my eyes, the images of the scene Homer evoked in me 35 years ago are as vivid as ever, but, more importantly, I owe it to the teachers that taught me Greek, and who happened to be excellent, by virtue of their example that it would be a great idea to become a scholar. In short: the intellectual level of the people educating me made a much more lasting impression than the specific subject matter they taught me.”
Make what you will of recommending the reading of a few hundred verses of classical poetry as a sleeping aid. As to the rest of the quote, it pertains to the topic at hand in the parts that I highlighted. On the lasting impact of things once learned and then forgotten, Susan Sontag expressed a similar sentiment. She made, however, a distinction between different types of knowledge.
“the literary-artistic culture is understood as a general culture. It is addressed to man insofar as he is man... it is a culture which a man has in his possession when he has forgotten everything that he has read. The scientific culture, in contrast, is a culture for specialists; it is founded on remembering and is set down in ways that require complete dedication of the effort to comprehend. While the literary-artistic culture aims at internalization, ingestion–in other words, cultivation–the scientific culture aims at accumulation and externalization in complex instruments for problem-solving and specific techniques for mastery.”
Most people won’t get anxious over how well they understood a work of art, so long as they experienced it, nor will they dwell on the amount of information they retained from a work of literature if they can still remember the way reading it made them feel. In fact, one doesn’t even need to remember anything at all; the implication seems to be that the edifying effects of consuming art and literature are a given, and that they are permanent. To the degree that I agree with this sentiment, I doubt whether the effect is limited to art-literature to the exclusion of scientific or other forms of knowledge. If that were the case, we may as well replace with AI all math and science teachers.
Sontag wrote elsewhere that “the knowledge we gain through art is an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than a knowledge of something (like a fact or a moral judgment) in itself.” In my experience, this is as true of scientific knowledge–and other forms of knowledge, like learning a language–as it is of art. As far as formal education goes, I have specialized and de-specialized a few times over, so who’s to say that the knowledge I no longer retain did not have a lasting impact on me? And I don’t mean merely in the utilitarian sense that studying electrical engineering, for example, and then not working a day in my life in the field, will still have sharpened my problem-solving skills and my critical thinking, but in the same sense in which Homer’s poems still had an impact on Edsger Dijkstra after he could no longer read Ancient Greek. It’s almost as if the enlightening effects of knowledge by its very nature have a no-returns policy, imperfections of memory notwithstanding, and teachers, in my experience, play an integral role in that enlightenment.
A teacher does to his subject what Sontag says works of art or literature do to facts and moral judgments: he instructs the student, explicitly but more often implicitly, on how the knowledge of that subject is experienced. He demonstrates through example the human quality of having this knowledge, be it poetry, geology, math, or computer science. And that human quality not only matters; I’m hard pressed, frankly, to think of anything else that does. Math, to give an example, is only a worthwhile field of study or research insofar as people teach and study it.
Picture a young dancer studying under an experienced teacher. It’s easy to imagine that, in the student’s mind, there’s hardly a separation between the teacher and the knowledge she imparts; it’s manifest in the teacher’s body and the quality of her movements, down to the smallest detail, and, should the student observe with intent, even in the way she breathes. Why is it any different in the case of a math teacher? Is there really a duality of teacher and knowledge to the point of suggesting that if the knowledge could be produced or “generated” otherwise, then the teacher’s role would been weakened or forced to change? People argue to no end about whether art could be separated from the artist, but somehow, it’s taken for granted that science and the scientist—or the teacher of science—are trivially separable. What gives?
I’d like to bear out the impact of the intellectual level of teachers, as Edsger Dijkstra puts it, with another personal story, but hard as I tried, I couldn’t do it without explaining—bear with me—the basics of the nuclear chain reaction. If I had a way to convey the pedagogical genius of my 12th grade physics teacher without telling you what happens when the nucleus of an isotope of uranium, U-235, is bombarded by neutrons, then that’s exactly what I would have done. I honor the time you put aside in order to read this, so if I thought it wasn’t essential for the coherence and clarity of the forthcoming anecdote, I would not have burdened you with the details (which you may already know) that one of the neutrons will cause the U-235 nucleus into split into nuclei of lighter isotopes, like krypton-89 and barium-144, releasing in the process three free neutrons and a lot of energy. The free neutrons will cause the same reaction in other U-235 nuclei, and those will release two or three neutrons each and even more energy, and so on and so forth, a self-sustaining process—a chain reaction. Now that we’re on equal footing as far as having elementary knowledge of nuclear fission, the basis of both nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, I should stress that I hadn’t known any of this prior to the day of the following incident—and like Dijkstra’s Ancient Greek, I’d long since forgotten most of the details and had to look them up, but the way it was taught to me is something I’ll never forget.
The classroom walls, like the desks, were thinly covered in graffiti. They were in bad condition, but not bad enough, it seemed, for the school to repaint them, which meant that the graffiti had grown in density as the years went by. Most notable, from the point of view of students, were the scribbles in the whiteboard’s periphery. There was one in particular just to the right side of the whiteboard that stood out from the rest. It looked nothing like the common symbols of juvenile street art that our town was known for, and it was in Latin script instead of the usual Arabic. It would have been anyone’s guess for the better part of the school year what it really was, but for all intents and purposes, it looked to be a fragment of an equation. Our public schools followed a fixed classroom system, meaning that from my front-row desk, I saw that scribble day in and day out, and only occasionally wondered, sometimes with an equally clueless classmate, what exactly it was and why it was there.
The physics teacher was an elderly man who, if you squinted hard enough, had the mien and silhouette of one Albert Einstein. Whether the resemblance was sheer coincidence or a semi-conscious metamorphosis into one’s hero, it was impossible to tell—and we wouldn’t dare ask, because just like the math teacher I mentioned earlier, this one was extremely stolid and had zero tolerance for anything unrelated to class. I don’t recall ever seeing the man smile. (Many of our other teachers, fortunately, were much more easygoing.) One day, towards the end of the unit which covered modern physics, he was explaining the nuclear chain reaction, as thoroughly and impassively as any other topic he taught. Suddenly, while writing the equations that described the reaction, his pace of writing quickened. The first equation’s product: fission fragments, free neutrons, and energy; then three more equations, one for each ejected neutron: even more neutrons and energy. To stress the self-propagating nature of the process, he went on frantically writing each equation in full until the whiteboard was covered, and sure enough, the ad infinitum equation terminated outside the whiteboard, in that scribble of graffiti that had stood there unexplained the whole year. And, as it turned out, for several years prior. He had done this before, and he presumably did it again the following years until the walls were repainted, if they ever were, or until he retired—whichever came first.
It amazed me that someone hell-bent on being serious all the time could find respite in a string of formulas, in writing symbols from memory and teaching what they signified year after year. Symbols that to many would have looked like foreign script brought the unsmiling old man some joy—or so I thought, because he never admitted as much. He didn’t so much as turn away from the whiteboard to make eye contact with his audience and acknowledge the genius of his pedagogical flourish—he continued the lesson as if nothing out of the norm had happened. But I could sense his satisfaction with the stunt he’d just pulled off. Maybe I caught a glimpse of a smirk or imagined a spring in the three steps that he took to the other side of the board, to wipe it clean and start over with something new. Or maybe the joy I imagined was just a reflection of the way his trick made me feel. Either way, it was quite literally awesome.
The brilliance of teachers comes in many forms, and I’m lucky to have had many great teachers over the years. Like the two men I mentioned, I’m not someone who wears his heart on his sleeve; I know what it’s like to bottle up feelings and continue to do one’s duties; I know that it’s not always a choice. This could be the reason those two stayed so fresh in my memory. For what it’s worth, I’ve come far enough in life—or far away, at least, from the surroundings of that high school—in part due to my admiration of such teachers and their embodiment of the quality of knowledge—despite, now in hindsight, their obvious neurodivergence. They made me want to be knowledgeable too. I guess what I’m trying to say is that AI-mongers will have to pry the joy of teaching and learning from our dead bodies—which I wouldn’t put past them.
Michael Silverblatt: ... magnificent minds and voices that knew how to speak and what they put on display was that they could, that they could speak movingly, passionately, without preparation... I would like to say it almost didn't matter to me what their tastes and choices were. They demonstrated that they had taste and made choices. I loved, though, that these people were there to teach me what it was to be a man thoughtful in the world. And that's what I thought was what my teachers did for me, because my family couldn't have.
Harold Bloom: It's very good to hear that, because after 50 years as a teacher, I still understand very little, explicitly or perhaps even implicitly, about what it is that one is doing.
From Bookworm: Harold Bloom: The Best Poems of the English Language, Jun 10, 2004