Teacher's Day 2023: Can AI Substitute My Teacher?

Can AI substitute my Teacher?

The Teenager Today, September 2023 p. 13. 

As digital technology is radically revolutionalising human spaces, it is also posing a threat, showing the possibilities to replace humans from several conventional jobs. A moot question is raised if AI could substitute the teacher. There are already schools that have deployed AI teacher to assist the human teacher.  As we celebrate the teacher’s day this year, we celebrate the irreplaceable and transforming human relations that teachers are called to build up, within the warmth of which learning, with or without AI, could take place.  

Bharat Ratna, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, a great Indian teacher, who grew to be the President of India, felt that the respect he received from his students, should be there for the entire teaching community. As per his desire, India celebrates Teachers’ Day, September 5, his birthday, from 1962 the year he assumed the office of the President. Of paradoxical interest is the fact that his emergence as the great teacher and exponent of Indian’s cultural heritage, was a reaction against the demeaning criticism of Indian knowledge traditions by his English educators; though his acumen was acknowledged and promoted by some of these very English educators, whom he held in great respect as model teachers! 

World-wide, from 1994, October 5 is the Teacher’s Day, celebrating the day of approval of ILO/UN charter on the ‘Status of Teachers’ in 1966. India has a tradition of celebrating teacher’s day on the full moon of the month of Ashad, remembering the birthday of Guru Vedavyas, credited to have the Vedas (shruti) presented in the form available to us; and also the day of enlightenment of a great teacher, Sri Gautam Buddha.

The day is meant to celebrate the noble call to be a teacher.  It involves respect for the individual teachers through whose care generations pass and are built up.  They mould the nations; they shape the future.  It is a reminder to the state and the leaders that every effort to get the best possible people for this great task should be made, and that it should be made a sought-after profession.

On the part of the students, it is an opportunity to recognize the great work and the tremendous task that the teachers undertake, year after year, to train new learners the skills to walk, dress, talk, count, read, write, draw, observe, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate and create new knowledge!  

Let us celebrate our teachers:

1. Know your teacher – her* name, her family, her interests, her talents and skills, her goodness.  Know the names of as many of your teachers as possible.  

2. Greet her and decide to greet her daily

3. Create a card to tell her how you value or what difference she makes in your life.

4. Prepare and teach a lesson in her presence

5. Say a prayer for your teachers and their happiness.

Reinforcing the Great Call beyond a Career

A teacher today can be threatened of her job position  only if she fails to grasp the spread of the canvass that is before her, whereon, the transfer of information is just one aspect, and more important aspects are learning to learn, to live and to live together.  As the teacher Bonnie in the popular American story tells in response to the ridiculing question in the party by a company CEO as to what she ‘makes’, if every teacher is able to narrate what they ‘make’ thus: “I make the children work harder than they ever thought they could,  make them write and read, read, read…, make them wonder, question, apologize and mean it, take responsibility for their actions, respect themselves and others, feel safe, understand if they use their God-given gifts and follow their hearts, they can succeed in life”, then, AI or any other technology will still have to wait for ages to be a substitute for a teacher!

*Not meant to exclude any gender.