I just became CEO of one of education’s Big 3. Here’s why AI will never replace a great teacher
Earlier this year, I became CEO of McGraw Hill. Within days, the question arrived—as it always does: Aren’t you terrified of what AI will do to your industry?
My answer: not even a little.
I’ve had a front-row seat to every major tech panic of the last three decades. At Microsoft in the 90s, PCs and the Internet were going to obliterate entire industries. At Amazon, the cloud was going to disintermediate any company without an API. At Google, I watched the AI fearmongering reach a full boil. Each time, the doomsayers were wrong—not because the technology wasn’t powerful, but because they wildly underestimated what humans bring to the table.
Nowhere is that truer than in education. Here’s why.
1. Your kid’s brain runs laps around any AI model—on a grilled cheese and tomato soup.
Learning isn’t a data problem. It is physical, social, and emotional—shaped by age, culture, and even what happened at recess. No algorithm captures that. Only a teacher does.
Here’s a number that should stop you cold: Harvard and Google researchers mapped just 1 cubic millimeter of human brain tissue—smaller than a grain of rice—and found 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses, with an ability to store over 705 million bits of information. Every second, that rice-sized sliver sifts through billions of bits of data on 20 watts of power. Training a frontier AI model, by comparison, requires a nuclear power plant and a small lake’s worth of water. A day of learning for an average 8-year-old? Fueled by grilled cheese and a cup of tomato soup.
2. Teaching Algebra 2 involves trillions of variables. Only a human can feel their way through it.
Our brains don’t just store knowledge—they physically rewire around it. Synapses coil, expand, connect, and rearrange every second of every day. That means every student walks into the classroom with a literally different brain than they had yesterday. With a subject like Algebra 2 alone, there are 2384 potential knowledge states. An effective teacher must navigate trillions of distinct learning pathways to comprehension—in real time, for 20 or 30 kids at once.
The best teachers don’t consciously calculate any of this. They just know their students—their strengths, their struggles, the mood they walked in wearing, and exactly which approach will make something click. It’s why they get goosebumps when a kid looks up and says, “I get it.” No LLM has ever felt that. No LLM ever will.
3. The ‘last mile’ of education has always thwarted Silicon Valley—and it still will.
Every generation of startups makes the same mistake: they assume that enough code—or today, enough prompts—can replicate deep domain knowledge, community trust, and the irreducibly human texture that makes a company built to last. It never does. That’s why only 1% of unicorns over the past 20 years have sustained their success.
This is especially true in education. Pedagogy shifts by zip code. It shifts by instructor. It shifts by the look on a child’s face at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. What we actually need is a new generation of teacher-centric tools—built for educators, not as replacements for them—that customize learning at the individual level and finally blow up the one-size-fits-all model that has held education back for generations.
That’s the work we’re doing. The industries of the next 50 years—space exploration, robotics, bioinformatics, nanoparticle manufacturing, quantum computing—will demand skills we haven’t fully imagined yet. Education has to keep pace. AI is helping: machine learning has helped teachers identify comprehension gaps for decades, and now LLMs are powering personalized content, adaptive labs, and immersive games—not to answer questions for students, but to give teachers better tools to ask them.
The complexity of developing human intelligence doesn’t just exceed any AI model ever built. It exponentially dwarfs all of them combined. That’s not a reason to fear this moment. That’s a reason to be more excited about education than at any point in history—and to make sure the humans at the center of it have everything they need to make the most of it.
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