Why AI will never replace a great teacher | Matt Wu

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.

**Matt Wu** (0:10)
Ask any student what has changed their life the most, and they won't tell you about a technology. They'll tell you about a person, a teacher who believed in them before they believed in themselves.

**Elise Hu** (0:23)
That's Matt Wu, an education innovator and founder of Schoolhouse.World, a non-profit that pairs students across the globe with free peer tutors. In this talk, he shares why what happens in these tutoring sessions goes far beyond equations because as young people learn to listen, to disagree with curiosity, and to collaborate across borders, they learn to believe in themselves.

**Matt Wu** (0:46)
That is what makes education human.
Not just the transfer of knowledge, but the ability to understand others and use that to shape your own perspective. If the goal is to optimize productivity, then yeah, AI will win. But if we aspire to build a better society, and we must deliver the human connection and develop the human skills that our young people are going to increasingly need.

**Elise Hu** (1:09)
Stick around, we caught up with TED curator Chloe Shasha Brooks, who shared how Matt shifted her own thinking on virtual learning and more. That's all coming up right after a short break.
And now, our TED Talk of the day.

**Matt Wu** (1:29)
We're living in the most remarkable moment in the history of education. AI can now tutor you in calculus, it can write you a semester-long study plan. I even had one of our students tell me that they instructed their AI to teach computer science the way Gordon Ramsay runs Kitchen Nightmares.
AI is seriously changing the education game. It's making knowledge more accessible, more personalized and more intuitive than we ever thought possible. But ask any student what has changed their life the most, and they won't tell you about a technology. They'll tell you about a person. A teacher who believed in them before they believed in themselves. A friend who kept showing up even when things got hard. A mentor who saw their potential before they could see it themselves.
We're investing billions into making sure we put the very best AI tools onto every screen on the planet. But with all of this technology at our fingertips, why aren't we investing just as urgently into making sure every student can connect with the people who will change their life?
I've been grappling with this question quite a bit over the last four years while working on something called peer tutoring. It's a simple concept, students teaching other students. Imagine any classroom that you've ever been in, right? Twenty students all learning the same thing. A concept might click for one student, but trip up another. Now, if you match those two students, something beautiful happens. One tutors the other. The tutor builds confidence, and reinforces their own learning. The learner gets personalized support from someone who just figured it out themselves.
This peer tutoring concept is the foundation of Schoolhouse, the nonprofit I lead that connects high school students around the world for peer tutoring over Zoom. Today, nearly 200,000 students have received tutoring from 30,000 incredible volunteer tutors, adding up to over 100 million minutes of learning, all completely for free.
And so as AI reshapes this world around us, I believe that our need for the genuine human connection has never mattered more. And I've seen proof in the most unexpected places that we can build it, scale it and change lives with it. Carl lost his father when he was in high school and dropped out to support his family. And for his entire adult life, he hid the fact that he had never graduated. Until at 52, when he decided to go back for his high school diploma. But Carl needed help. Algebra terrified him, and so he looked to Schoolhouse for a tutor. Across the country, Sachin, a 14-year-old in the Bay Area, signed up for Schoolhouse to help out other kids his age. He certainly wasn't expecting Carl, who is noticeably not his age in his first tutoring session, but he quickly realized that Carl was someone he could help.
Every Sunday for over a year, they showed up for tutoring. An adult learner in Mississippi, a teenager in California. And yeah, Carl was learning algebra, but more importantly, he was learning to believe in himself again. Here they are just one week before Carl's exam.

**Sachin** (5:13)
That's P multiplied by 2, right?

**Carl** (5:16)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_5** (5:16)
No, no, no, no, no, no.

**Carl** (5:18)
It's P divided by 2

**SPEAKER_5** (5:20)
All right.