What AI Can Replace: The Human Encounter at the Heart of Teaching

One of the buzz questions in education today is whether generative AI will replace human teachers.

For me, the answer is obvious.

AI will transform teaching. It will generate lesson plans, explanations, worksheets, quizzes, reading texts, feedback and assessment materials at remarkable speed. It may take over many of the technical and administrative tasks that currently consume teachers’ time.

But teaching is not, at its core, a technical process.

It is a human encounter.

The theatre director Peter Brook in his book The Empty Space wanted to identify what theatre was at its core. He stripped away the scripts, stages, costumes, lights, theatre buildings and all the usual paraphernalia until he was left with the core: an encounter between actor and spectator.

Everything else could change or disappear. But without that encounter, there was no theatre.

We can carry out the same experiment with education.

Remove the curriculum documents, assessment tools, lesson plans, coursebooks, interactive whiteboards, worksheets and digital platforms. Remove, even, the AI-generated materials that are now becoming part of everyday teaching.

What remains?

A teacher and learners in relationship.

Of course, resources, planning and technology can support learning but they are support mechanisms. They are not the essence of education itself.

At its core, education is an encounter between people.

Think back to a teacher who changed the direction of your life.

Perhaps they changed how you saw a subject, sparked an interest you did not know you had, challenged you at the right moment, or gave you confidence when you doubted yourself.

What do you remember?

Not a worksheet.

Not a lesson plan.

Not an assessment rubric.

What endures is the quality of the encounter: being noticed, being given time, being challenged with care, being protected from humiliation, or being helped to imagine a wider possibility for yourself.

And the opposite is true too.

Many people remember classrooms in which they felt invisible, controlled, dismissed or unable to speak. These memories are not about content. They are about how it felt to be in the room.

That is why the question of AI and teaching cannot be answered simply by comparing what AI can produce with what teachers can produce.

AI can generate content.

But education is not only content.

A simple game, and a crucial difference

Take a very simple activity called “1, 2, 3”.

Two people count to three together, taking turns:

“One.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
“One.”
“Two.”
“Three.”

It sounds easy.

But when people first try it, someone almost always says “four” instead of returning to “one”. Counting onwards is so deeply built into our habits that it is difficult to override.

This usually produces laughter.

The game feels deceptively simple, but it requires attention, concentration and coordination. Then the numbers can be replaced with sounds, gestures or actions, making the task more challenging and playful.

Now imagine teaching the same game to two AI bots.

They would make no mistakes.

They would play rapidly, accurately and perfectly.

But what would be missing?

There would be no surprised laughter when someone says “four”.

No moment of eye contact when one person realises they have made an error.

No smile of encouragement.

No shared frustration.

No praise.

No sense of achievement.

No emotional charge at all.

The AI bots might complete the task perfectly, but they would not experience the learning.

Human learning is not simply the successful processing of information. It is embodied, social, emotional and relational. It involves risk, uncertainty, attention, confidence, embarrassment, play, trust and recognition.

This is where human teachers remain irreplaceable.

The performative skills of teaching

I refer to these distinctly human capacities as performative skills.

Teaching is inherently performative because it is enacted in real time, in relationship with other people.

Teachers’ voices, timing, attention, use of space, body language, responses and relationships all shape how learning is experienced.

The same correction technique can communicate confidence in a learner’s potential — or public judgement.

The same question can invite thought — or create exposure.

The same task can stimulate curiosity — or feel coercive.

The same silence can create thinking space — or anxiety.

None of these things are determined by the activity itself. They depend on how the teacher brings the activity to life.

This is why technical competence is not enough.

Teacher education has emphasised the importance of well-designed tasks, clear explanations, accurate language analysis and carefully staged activities. Increasingly, AI can support — and outperform — teachers in producing these things efficiently.

But pedagogy is never received in a vacuum.

A lesson is not simply a sequence of procedures.

It is experienced through the teacher’s presence.

The teacher is not merely the person who delivers the material.

The teacher is part of how the material is felt, interpreted and remembered.

What AI cannot fully do

AI may be able to explain grammar and produce better worksheets.

Learners are not simply information processors. They are speaking with incomplete resources. They are risking mistakes, accents, identities and social judgement. They are trying to express themselves in a language they do not yet fully control.

That makes the language classroom a vulnerable space.

And vulnerable spaces need human presence.

The future of teaching is more human, not less

The future of teaching is not a competition between teachers and AI.

AI can become a powerful partner. It can free teachers from repetitive work, generate resources, offer ideas and create more time for the parts of teaching that matter most.

But the more AI can do technically, the more important the human dimension of teaching becomes.

The future of education is not simply better content.

AI will give us more content than we could ever use.

The future of education is creating classrooms where learners feel safe enough to try, recognised enough to contribute and agentive enough to grow.