TV was going to replace teachers. Then computers. Then the internet. Then MOOCs. Now AI. A teacher I respect put it best: "Every fifteen years a new technology shows up and somebody announces it'll transform education. It never does the thing they promise. It does other things." She's right, and the pattern would be funny if education weren't quite so important.
So let me skip the manifesto. Over the last year I sat with teachers — primary and secondary, state and private, across four countries — who use AI tools every working day. Here's what they actually told me, sorted into what helps, what's been oversold, and the thing that keeps me up at night.
Genuinely useful
Feedback on the messy stuff. Not multiple-choice grading. Drafting comments on long, sprawling student writing. A good model reads the essay, proposes a first pass of feedback in the teacher's own register, and the teacher then edits, deletes, sometimes rewrites entirely. The student gets feedback that's both faster and more personal than before. That combination still surprises people.
Differentiation. The curriculum is one-size; no classroom ever is. One teacher I know produces three versions of every reading passage — at level, simplified, stretched — so her whole mixed-ability class meets the same idea on its own terms. That used to cost her two hours a lesson. It now costs fifteen minutes.
The 9pm Sunday colleague. A maths teacher described her AI assistant as "the colleague I always wanted — someone to throw half-formed lesson ideas at without feeling like I'm wasting their evening." She doesn't take its suggestions wholesale. She uses them as something to push against.
Accessibility, finally affordable. Live captioning for students with hearing loss. Text-to-speech for dyslexic readers. Image description for visually impaired students. These tools existed before; the current versions are dramatically better and, for the first time, cheap enough for every classroom rather than the lucky ones.
Oversold, in my view
"Adaptive learning platforms" have promised personalised education for twenty years and mostly still disappoint. Their read on what a student is struggling with is narrow, and the recommendations narrower still. The ones that earn their place give teachers better visibility into understanding — they don't try to be the teacher.
AI tutors as a stand-in for human ones haven't delivered. As supplements — a patient partner to practise French with, a coding sidekick for a sixteen-year-old learning Python — they can be excellent. As replacements they're not there, and I'm not convinced they should be.
Essay graders that claim to score writing are often beaten by a human with ten minutes of training. They reward length, vocabulary and tidy structure. Voice, ideas, argument — the things we actually teach for — sail straight past them.
The bit that worries me
Students are using AI to do their homework right now, today. Some of that is fine; tools are tools. But there's a real risk we raise a generation who never grow the mental calluses that only come from grinding away at a hard problem alone. The struggle isn't a bug in learning. It's the mechanism.
Banning AI in schools won't fix this. Redesigning what we ask of students might. More writing done in the room. More talking out loud. More assignments where using the model is part of the task — "have a model attack your argument, then rewrite to defend it" — rather than a shortcut nobody admits to. Teachers are already inventing this, fast and thoughtfully, with almost no help from the AI industry. They're the ones worth listening to.
What we've been doing about it
We run hands-on workshops for school-age children that treat AI as a thing you can pick up, poke at, laugh at when it's wrong, and use as a springboard into real understanding. The kids enjoy it. The teachers enjoy it more — because for once it's a thing offered to them, not imposed on them.
If you teach, or you're a school leader staring down the question of an AI policy, talk to us. I mean that selfishly as much as generously: we learn at least as much from these conversations as we bring to them.
