AI has changed role of teachers in education

Editor's note: The Chinese authorities recently emphasized the need to deepen education and teaching reforms with a student-centered approach to create new advantages in basic education. At the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which concluded in Shanghai on Monday, some educators, including Li Luming, president of Tsinghua University, spoke of how AI continues to reshape the education sector. Below are excerpts from their speeches as reported in People's Daily. The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.

With AI offering more convenient ways to access knowledge, students don't rely only on the classroom to learn. The traditional lecture-centered approach, in which teachers simply deliver information in classrooms, is no longer sufficient.

Students, teachers and university administrators must recognize a fundamental reality: within the next three to five years, the nature and standards of research in highly innovative disciplines such as mathematics and physics will be dramatically different from what they are today. Schools that cling to traditional approaches to education and research will struggle to maintain their strengths.

Research suggests that in the AI era, students should prioritize developing skills such as language proficiency, social interaction, problem-solving, critical thinking, perception, hands-on practice and human-AI collaboration.

This calls for a comprehensive overhaul of school curricula and talent cultivation models. Traditional disciplines need to embrace intelligent transformation by moving away from conventional teaching approaches and fostering greater interdisciplinary integration.

In traditional schools, the brightest students have often been regarded as the most capable. But when AI can outperform humans in many tasks, a more important question emerges: who can be trusted, and who is willing to take responsibility? This is precisely where humans remain irreplaceable.

AI has no lived experience of consequences and cannot assume responsibility in the way people can. For this reason, schools should invest substantial time and effort in character education and innovation projects that solve real-world problems for real users. The goal is to cultivate graduates who are trustworthy and capable of taking on increasing levels of responsibility.

Future talents will need the ability to define problems independently, adapt knowledge to real-world contexts, integrate insights across disciplines and continuously refine solutions through engineering-based iteration. Ironically, these are among the scarcest capabilities in today's education system and the ones AI cannot directly provide.

In the age of AI, young people's core competitiveness is shifting from acquiring knowledge quickly to defining problems deeply, and from remembering the right answers to asking original and meaningful questions.

Only teachers who actively embrace change and continually improve their teaching can serve as true role models for students. At the same time, human-AI collaboration has become the new normal in scientific research and is reshaping education as well.

AI can empower both teaching and research across existing disciplines, necessitating a careful redesign of future curricula and academic evaluation systems. Universities should provide cutting-edge AI tools, research platforms and supporting resources while embedding AI safety principles into teaching and research and establishing sound ethical standards for its use.

In terms of the breadth of knowledge, AI may even surpass classroom instructors. This compels teacher education institutions to rethink the role of teachers. In the future, teachers must help students learn how to work effectively with AI. A truly outstanding teacher in the AI era will need to be a mentor who not only imparts knowledge and cultivates character but also guides students in human-AI collaboration.