Will the future be of robot teachers? Or teacher robots?

You may remember when, a few months ago, Pepper the Robot gave testimony to the Education Select Committee. That day, Times education editor Sian Griffiths asked Twitter how long it would be before teacher shortages were filled by robots. A tongue-in-cheek comment, surely? If you believe that, then you won’t be comforted by what Professor John Hattie had to say in Edinburgh this week. The author of Visible Learning, a book with Teflon-level resistance to valid criticism, which has granted Hattie a sort of canonisation in his own lifetime among the education community, was speaking to the Visible Learning World Conference. Yes, as well as radicalising individuals and semi-autonomous cells of true believers, the book has spawned an eponymous world conference. (No, it’s nothing like a religion. Honest.)At this conference, Hattie reported upon a visit to Asia where he’d seen a lesson taught by a robot. Afterwards, the students allegedly said in conversation with him that they preferred the robot teacher to its human antecedent. Hattie used the speech to undermine the idea that student-teacher relationships, and student-student relationships, are crucial to education. In a clarion call to policymakers to take AI seriously, he stated that it has the power to “reduce some of the problems that we have that are related to human interaction and all the biases that relate to it”.