Education an FaceApp

Will teachers be replaced by robots?

During the last few days, an app called FaceApp went viral on the internet and I must admit that I also tried it out. However today I am not going to mention about the effects of social media and neither about the rumours that the app is being used by Russian developers..etc I think to try the app is something which every person decide for themselves. Click on the video below to find out how I think education looks on FaceApp.

Trying out the aged tool on FaceApp with my profile photo made me think how it will be when I will become an old person. (obviously this is only if I will live long enough) I was thinking that getting older is something unavoidable although there might be some ways to slow down the process or to reduce the effects. ( Healthy diets, exercise..etc)

Once we tried out our photos with my wife using most of the tools, I started thinking to place education on FaceApp. 

How would it look when the existing educational systems would get older?

What would be the ways to slow down the aging process for the educational systems.

How can it stay healthy and fit?

What would happen to the teachers who are now the main role players in education?

All this thinking ended up with a popular question raising in my head

Will teachers be replaced by robots? 

Yes, I think some teachers will be and should be replaced by robots.

First of all I want to underline the fact that I am not a technological expert neither a futurist but I am someone who likes to think how things will change in the future (I must admit that I also get excited about it).

Having spent 10 years as an educator and many more as a learner, unfortunately I have also seen/heard teachers who already teach like a robot. Sadly this is not in a very positive way. They fail to set up a connection with their students and instead they choose just to teach the curriculum, giving tests, marking them, putting in grades, and finishing their “job” at whatever time their contact says so. As some of them were blaming the traditional systems by which they were brought up, it has always been something which I found very difficult to understand and I don’t think I will ever understand. It is about the lack of human feelings and connections between the teachers and the students. As I believe this is the most important thing in the educational process. 

For me a good teacher is the one who can connect with his/her students and wake up their curiosity to learn and question about the things which surround them. 

As this is one of the main problems in existing educational systems, I think this will decide which teachers will not be replaced by robots. No matter how developed the robots will become, I don’t think they will be able to have all the humanistic features of a good teacher so they will still not be that successful in connecting with the children. For a child/person in order to have a good learning process first they should believe that the person who is trying to teach them at least care who they are and how they feel. The effective teachers are the ones who are able to do this with most of their students if not with all of them. It is also easier to take a role model from people/things who are like us. 

Humans will always have an advantage with this against mechanical robots even if they will be having very developed ways of artificial intelligence. All the challenge is for us not to lose our humanity and become robots as in that way we will have no chance against robots equipped with artificial intelligence.