No Matter How Advanced Technology, Teacher Remains Irreplaceable

by M. Faisal Javier Anwar

A student is doing his assignment in his home. Covid-19 pandemic forces school closure in many regions of Indonesia, and educational activities rely on online learning method nearly completely (Warta Kota/Alex Suban)

The rapid development of educational technology is something inevitably. Consequently, critical questions come up following such thing. One of them is will the teacher be replaced due to such condition?

The effect of Covid-19 pandemic makes that thing more and more relevant. Everything that used to count on face-to-face activities, now is avoided as much as possible, including the field of education, to prevent the contagion of coronavirus. As a result, schools have to be closed, and the learning activities are transformed into distance learning.

There are many e-learning platforms developed by educational startup companies that are used to support distance learning. In Indonesia, the Ministry of Education and Culture has cooperation with some educational startup companies to provide contents for distance learning. Preemployment card (Kartu Prakerja), a government program aimed to aid job seekers and laid-off workers by granting them incentive funds and access to a broad range of training, also used online courses contents which are provided by selected startup companies.

At a glance, it seems that the presence of a teacher is no longer necessary. However, how accurate is this assumption? Should we leave formal educational institutions, like school; college; and so forth, then rely on online learning completely?

The answer is we should not. Teacher can not be replaced. People can make educational contents as many as possible for online learning. People can make a lot of technological features that have the purpose to replace partially or even completely the roles of teachers. But, we are human beings after all. Humans need interaction, because humans are social beings, so does education. Education without teaching is nothing.

For instance, I am taking an academic writing course. The course counts on distance learning completely. There is not a kind of virtual meeting, only booklet, learning materials, and tasks. Interactions are merely conducted via Whatsapp or email. For advanced students, they might not be, or just a little, troubled. But, how about beginner or intermediate students? Is that effective for them? I do not think so.

A research conducted by Bao et al. (2020) indirectly corroborates the beyond-price role of teacher in education. They found out that the rate of literacy gain in kindergarten children slows down 65 percent during school closures compared to active schooling before pandemic. A practitioner also doubts the effectiveness of technology to replace teacher. CEO of Silicon Schools, Brian Greenberg, in his interview with Business Insider says, “Technology is important, but it is really just the means to an end.”

Another reason why technology can not adequately substitute our teacher in the school is technology can not teach our kids values. Technology may be able to provide material learning about ethics, values, and morals, but teaching values needs the presence of teacher to demonstrate it. Because values—like respect, manner, ethics, courtesy, and so on—are not only needed to be told, but also practiced. Besides our kids will be growing up and really dealing with people around, not AI in their gadget.

Therefore the development of technology does not replace the teacher forever. Education without the presence of teacher will go wrong because interactions are one of main keys in education. We need technologies to facilitate the teachers; not replace them instead.