Why AI will never replace a great teacher | Matt Wu

0:03You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. 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. That's Matt Wu, an education innovator and founder of Schoolhouse.world, a nonprofit 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.

0:46That 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, then we must deliver the human connection and develop the human skills that our young people are going to increasingly need. And 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.

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3:39And now our TED Talk of the day. 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.

4:24A 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?

5:00I'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.

5:49Today, 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.

6:06And 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.

6:54He 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. That's P multiplied by two, right? Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's P divided by two. All right, well, let's see. There you go, Carl. Nice job. All right, then, Sachs. Thank you.

7:39How are you feeling? How do you think you're going to do on the real test? My confidence began to kick in. I can't get weak in algebra now. Yeah. They're awesome. Carl took his exam, and he scored highest in algebra, the subject that once terrified him. Thank you. Here's what sticks with me about that story, though. Carl was 14 when he dropped out, the exact same age as Sachin. If Carl had had a Sachin when he was 14, we could be looking at a very different life trajectory. We talk a lot about making sure students can get access to the right tools and the right technology, but we also need to make sure that every student can access a Sachin, Someone who can provide the connection and motivation that only another human can.

8:33Along the way, we discovered something else. We saw that this peer tutoring wasn't just teaching students how to learn concepts, it was also teaching them how to better understand one another. This realization led us to create a new program called Dialogues, where we would pair students who had differing perspectives on often complex or controversial issues like immigration or gun control or abortion. There was no moderator, no script, just two students talking over Zoom. And I'll be honest, I was kind of skeptical at first. For example, we were going to be pairing Joseph in China with Brian in America to discuss free speech versus hate speech.

9:16Like, what could possibly go wrong? But luckily, we were able to get permission to share a few highlights from these conversations. In China, free speech is not something that people participate in. I think if a politician does use hate speech, then I'll show at the voting booth. I've learned a lot today. I've had to consider things I never would have otherwise considered. Friends know I don't talk about politics. I think humility is so important when coming into these issues. I may be wrong, you know. I need to do my research. I was born in India. There, it's a very rough income inequality. How would they feel saying some of their equity from the business they built up just has to be taxed away to some person they barely know?

10:02And I think you've genuinely changed my mind. This is such a wonderful conversation. You kept bringing in your science nerd knowledge.

10:17It's striking to me just how genuine these conversations are. Students show up with passion and conviction, and then they do the thing that many adults are starting to forget how to do. They listen. Brian said it perfectly. He had to consider what he's otherwise never had to consider. 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. It can only happen when there's another human on the other end, and it's on us to make sure that every student can engage meaningfully with those who see the world differently.

10:57I've been able to see the impact of this human connection, but often in contexts that were hard to scale. In college, I tutored for a program called Amphibious Achievement, where we taught Boston public students how to recruit and prep for the SAT. That's what we were doing on the surface, but our main goal was actually to help every student build an unrelenting belief in themselves. And if you're wondering why belief, well, belief is in every student. It takes a lot of hard work to unlock, but once it's there, it can completely change what a student believes is attainable. And so I saw when my belief in a student would become their belief in themselves.

11:41I would see it take root, first as a rowing personal best, and then as a college acceptance letter, and soon you would see that student's entire personality come to life. But I also saw the limitations of this program model, where there would be students that we wanted to help, but the proximity or the timing or the number of tutors just wasn't there. But see, that's what's so unique about this peer model. It can scale. Every phone or laptop becomes a portal to a trusted human. At a global level, students can learn around the clock. And we were surprised to discover that the solution to our tutor shortage was actually right in front of us and our very own learners.

12:28Right? Because once a student masters the material, they can go on and teach it to somebody else. And we're seeing that already, with one in five of our tutors actually starting their schoolhouse journey first as a learner. The most exciting part about all of this is that institutions are starting to see the value of peer tutoring, too. We had a student in rural Arkansas, first generation, looking for a way to explore his passion in teaching. He found Schoolhouse and he ran with it, tutoring over 150 sessions in algebra, pre-calc, the SAT, and he was consistently rated in the top 5 % by his peers.

13:09All of his contributions showed up on his schoolhouse portfolio, which he submitted in college applications. Now, when admissions officers saw this, they didn't just see a letter grade. They saw proof of something deeper, that this student was adaptable, that he could help others in a way that was warm and patient and engaging, and that he'd already solved real problems with students from 40 other countries. His name is Emmanuel. He's at the University of Chicago now, and he recently told me that he wants to build his own education startup to pay it forward.

13:52Everyone's talking about the skills that AI is going to replace. But the skills Emmanuel demonstrated, the ability to care, to collaborate, to communicate, these are deeply human skills. They've always been important, but in the age of AI, they are the skills of the future. And this doesn't just end with college admissions. We're hearing the exact same thing from employers. The skills that they need most are the ones that you cannot automate. All of these stories are proof of what's possible when the authentic human connection is made accessible to everyone. But every year, we graduate another class of students, and every year, AI gets exponentially more powerful.

14:37If the goal is to optimize productivity, then yeah, AI will win. But if we aspire to build a better society, then we must deliver the human connection and develop the human skills that our young people are going to increasingly need. That is how we navigate the AI revolution in education, to create a more connected world, more capable students, and a more human future. Thank you.

15:10That was Matt Wu at TED 2026. And now here's TED curator Chloe Shasha Brooks, who digs into why she thinks what Schoolhouse is really doing is optimizing genuine connection and why working with him changed her mind about something she thought she already figured out. Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening to Matt Wu's talk. I'm Chloe Shasha Brooks speaking to you from New York City. One big theme in the curation for TED 2026 and beyond has been the critical nature of human connection in this burgeoning moment for AI. When Matt and I started working together on his talk, we went on a journey to figure out what the core message of his talk would be.

15:49And it became clear after a couple of drafts that what matters most to him in his work with Schoolhouse is the fact that genuine connections are being made as people teach and learn from each other. And that it's that genuine connection that actually helps people learn a subject they've struggled with. Matt is a very thoughtful, service-oriented person who cares so deeply about these people who use the platform. And I really believe that it's because of that care that he's been able to optimize Schoolhouse for what people are seeking, in addition to learning a subject in school, which is real relationships.

16:21To be honest, Matt has shifted my perspective on virtual learning. I think that many of us feel burnt out from Zoom life after COVID forced us all to be remote for years. Now I see the true benefits of a model where two people who probably live in different corners of the globe can symbiotically help each other with a niche interest. one person's specific need to learn something, and someone else's specific desire to teach that thing. This is especially true if you live in a place with few educational resources.

16:52If you're curious about TED's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tansika Sungmarnivong. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Christopher Faze-Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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