I am writing from London, where a major education innovation fair is taking place—the Bett Show—featuring established companies and startups from around the world offering solutions to support learning from early childhood education through higher education. The products include gamification in basic education, continuing education for teachers through distance learning, tools for assessing learning, and the use of artificial intelligence to enable the personalization of the teaching process.

As you walk through the booths and listen to the creators of these solutions, you can get a glimpse of trends in education, especially for countries that have already resolved their problems with access and quality.
But it’s impossible to look at these many technological alternatives without feeling skeptical about their usefulness in educating children who, in our case, are not even able to become literate by the end of the 3rd grade. On the other hand, the question arises as to whether these solutions will, in the future, tend to replace teachers.

Children use tablets in the classroom - Karime Xavier - Jan. 21, 2015/Folhapress
Neither one thing nor the other. Yes, we are not developing even basic skills such as literacy and numeracy in our students, but we cannot limit the teaching process to what we should already be doing well in order to prepare students for the century in which they live. The world won’t wait for us. 

We need to develop—with the support of technology and scientific findings—the cognitive, social-emotional, and digital skills of young people to ensure that the country builds a development process that includes everyone, in the face of the current wave of rapid replacement of human labor by artificial intelligence. And education will be key to this, provided it moves in the right direction.

The other risk—that of making teachers redundant—has not been confirmed by studies. On the contrary, even amid the profound demographic transition we are experiencing, experts have shown that there is a severe shortage of teachers capable of doing solid, consistent work to prepare children and young people for subsequent stages of schooling, for the world of work, and for life in society.

Artificial intelligence cannot eliminate teaching jobs, but it can be of great value to teachers if we, in fact, prepare them to work with information about what each student learns, in order to support them in discovering more effective teaching strategies and enable them to identify and address learning gaps. Nothing better has yet been invented for educating children and teenagers than a good teacher!