IF YOU were paying a private school to teach your children, my guess is that you would want there to be a teacher involved.

So it is with considerable chutzpah that one such school in London has just announced that it plans to introduce “teacherless classrooms”. David Game College is piloting an enterprise in which a ChatGPT-style AI will be used to “teach” a test group of pupils. A few old-school human beings will be around as “learning coaches”; but, otherwise, it’s pupil, desk, headphones, laptop.

The experiment is, predictably, portrayed as an opportunity to liberate and augment the role of the teacher. I am sceptical. In researching the forthcoming Theos report More: The problem with productivity, I wrote a bit about teaching, and came to the conclusion that it was one of those sectors in which our lust for productivity improvements risks doing us real harm.

The argument goes like this. In any human interaction, there are two elements: the what (e.g. the goods exchanged) and the how (e.g. nature of the encounter). Many interactions fall comfortably on one or other side of this line. For market interactions, for example, the what tends to matter more than the how. The encounter element is only peripheral. It is the reason that so many of us are happy to use self-service checkouts or ticket machines. Conversely, many interactions fall comfortably on the how side. You do not value your friends because of what they provide for you, but for who they are. Seeking productivity improvements in parenting or friendship is oxymoronic.

The problem is that some activities, such as teaching, fall across this line. When you attend school, you do want to come away with better knowledge or skills. But how you acquire them is almost as important as what you acquire. Education is about character formation — about stimulating, enthusing, empowering — just as much as about learning to count or code. And that formation comes through an irreducibly personal encounter in which one human being gets the other.

This is lost in teacherless “teaching”. “Our system will be like a personal tutor for each child,” the head teacher commented. Alas, that is how we use the word “personal” today. My bank boasts of the personal service that it provides me, despite the fact that I rarely engage with another person there.

But education is — or can be — personal in a deeper and truer sense, of an attentive, open, trusting, and inspiring encounter between two human beings, both flawed, but one equipped with more experience, knowledge, and passion for a subject, and desiring to pass it on to the other. Lose this, and we begin to lose ourselves.

Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos. More: The problem with productivity will be published next month. Read his review of The Divine Economy: How religions compete for wealth, power, and people by Paul Seabright here.

Angela Tilby is away.