AI, Education and Armed Robots - Are we ready? I am.
I just read a post about why AI will replace teachers, and my response is simple: it's not a question of if. It's happening. And after what my family has been through, I'm not just okay with it, I'm advocating for it, or at least a hybrid.
Before you come at me, let me tell you where I'm coming from.
As many of my fans and followers know, in September 2025, my son's school, Evergreen High School in Colorado, had a shooting. My son was returning to campus when a 16-year-old, with a revolver he had shipped from a Reddit group called masskillers, started firing. Two students were critically wounded. The shooter was radicalized by an extremist network online, and he died by self-inflicted gunshot wound after deputies confronted him.
I nearly lost my son as did hundreds of other parents.
Let me tell you what that does to a person. You become different. You don't care about politics anymore. You don't care about bullshit corporate friction or who's offended by what. You start to see the world for exactly what it is, a place that no longer values the future of our children. You realize the schools as they are today are more concerned about funding and appearances than real education or effort to move our children into the future safely. And you get very, very clear about what actually matters.
So when I talk about AI replacing teachers, I'm not theorizing from some ivory tower. I'm speaking as a father who has stared into the void and decided the current system has failed our children in every way that counts. I am also speaking as a dad of four kids, two others in college and one at 3.5 years old. So unless you have kids, you don't have an opinion I care about. Take a seat and learn.
How did we get to this crap place?
The education system we have today was designed in the late 1800s to produce factory workers, compliant, punctual, able to follow instructions and sit still for eight hours. It was never built to develop human potential. It was built to process humans. Bells, rows, age-based grouping, standardized tests, one teacher lecturing to 30 kids, all of it modeled after the industrial assembly line. Then we layered on unions that protect bad teachers, administrators who protect themselves, bureaucracies that move at the speed of molasses, and a political system that treats schools as ideological battlegrounds instead of places where kids actually learn.
The result?
A system optimized for compliance, not curiosity. For credentialing, not capability. For institutional survival, not student success. And we wonder why it's failing. And with AI the cost of that knowledge is now effectively ZERO. All that matters is teaching kids to adapt, while learning the basics of human cognition so the AI can take them the rest of the way. Then the humans should be teaching discernment, development, emotional growth and psychology mixed with philosophy. So we become more.
Here are the hard truths for you all to digest about education and why AI is superior as a teacher of the future.
AI has infinite patience. It will explain something 47 times without sighing, without judgment, without making a kid feel stupid for not getting it the first time. Every human remembers a teacher who made them feel small. AI won't create that wound. And it's always with you, always ready to help you learn on your timeframe, not some antiquated industrialized view of educational timing designed a hundred years ago to produce factory workers. And it won't blame when you try to cheat, it will adapt to help you learn, to break through with the student. And it can be with them their whole journey, adapting as they age and helping at every stage of development.
AI instantly adapts to how you actually learn. Years ago, when I began to study the different human modalities, I learned from two geniuses in the space, Deanna Phelps and Stephen Hager, creators of Brain PathWays™. Deanna has over 30 years in neuroscience, working with adults and children with brain damage and neurological disorders, plus deep expertise in psychology, accelerated learning, and neuro-linguistic programming. Stephen had over 40 years in scientific research and organizational development. Together they've helped thousands of people around the globe understand how their brains actually process information. And what I learned from them, AI could leverage daily with students.
We all have these modalities and we each prefer something different between, visual, auditory, kinesthetic, for how we take in for and sequential or global for how we process that information. AI can shift in real time based on how you learn. So if you are more visual, auditory, kinesthetic, the AI is powerful at speaking to you on your level. If you process globally and need the big picture first, it gives you that. If you're sequential and need step by step, it meets you there. No teacher with 30 kids in a classroom can do that. It's physically impossible. But AI can give every single child a personalized learning experience. Every single one. By the way, did you know out of all humans only about 8-11% are auditory first? Yet schools today are antiquated to the mostly auditory model. AI solves this.
AI won't push a political ideology, left or right. We live in a time where a child can't say he likes Trump or hates Trump without some mindless teacher passing judgment, yelling, flipping out, projecting their narrative onto a kid who's just trying to figure out the world. We no longer have humans as teachers who can, with a level head, allow for diverse opinions. AI won't punish kids for defending themselves or their opinions. It will be objective.
Want proof?
Years ago, one of my sons was being bullied by three girls. He had given one a necklace as a gift, and she showed her friends, who tortured him about it. I mean daily, over and over. They made fun of him, shoved it in his face on the playground, pushed him. They were in fifth grade. He did what he was supposed to do. He told a teacher, told the principal, told the vice principal. Every single one of them said the same thing: "The girls are just playing. Ignore them."
Two days later, on the playground, my son hit his limit. He told the girls, "Stop teasing me or I will rip that necklace off and choke you with it."
So of course, the vice principal called me. First time anyone contacted me, by the way. And his words still make me shudder. After telling me the whole story, he said, "So I will assume you will back me in punishing your son at school because we can't have that kind of talking and threats here."
My response definitely changed the narrative.
I said, "If you think for a moment I will back you up, when I have not heard you say once how these terrorist girls are being addressed, you are out of your fucking mind. I demand a conference with these girls and their parents today. And then, and only then, will we properly assess my son. It seems to me they pushed him over the edge and now you want to blame the victim. That's, pardon my expression, horse shit."
Needless to say, all was forgiven. The girls were reprimanded. My son received no consequences for defending himself.
But here's the thing. AI would have managed all of that better. An agentic system that talked to the students in real time, documented the pattern, emailed or called me at the first sign of trouble, and applied reason, respect, and strategic vision instead of lazy administration that only acts when there's a threat to cover their ass. And this is just one example.
AI won't groom your child or confuse them about who they are. It won't sexually assault your child.
These aren't hypotheticals. We deal with this in Colorado daily.
Right here in Jefferson County, my county, a parent advocacy group recently documented 26 cases of sexual abuse, misconduct, grooming, and reporting failures since 2022. The district's own Chief of Schools, David Weiss, was fired in December 2024 and later shot himself while under investigation for possessing child sexual abuse material. He had used bitcoin to purchase child pornography while overseeing access to thousands of children.
A Columbine High School teacher named Leann Kearney groomed a 17-year-old student for years. When the mother discovered thousands of texts and calls between them, she went to the principal, and was told Kearney "helps kids navigate their sexuality." The school counselors then helped the student falsely declare herself homeless on a federal form so she could move in with the teacher. Ten school officials kept the parents in the dark. The teacher ran off to Oregon with the girl the moment she turned 18. The mother's words: "This was years of grooming. Then she took her. She took my kid." AI won't do that shit.
That's not education. That's predation protected by bureaucracy.
National research shows that approximately 10% of students will experience some form of educator sexual misconduct by the time they graduate high school. Federal data shows a 53% increase in sexual assault reports and a 99% increase in rape or attempted rape reports in schools between 2015 and 2018. Teachers accused of abuse are passed between an average of three school districts before anyone stops them, and may abuse up to 73 students before facing consequences. Read that again before you argue for human teachers.
You want to know why I want armed Tesla robots in every school? Because the humans running the system have proven they cannot protect our children from threats both inside and outside the school. They protect each other. They protect the union. They protect their pensions. They protect their ideology. But they do not protect our kids.
And what about AI teaching and coaching skills?
My own children have learned more from their AI coaches I taught them to use than most teachers in their entire lives. My daughters professors ask HER how to use AI. My 3.5 year old is more advanced than a 6 year old on math, reading and human skills because we decided to home school and use AI as a coach. He loves talking to AI.
And here's the thing about AI as coach, not just teacher, but coach. A coach that stays with the student. Keeps lessons alive. Reinforces learning across real days, real moments, real decisions. Always on. Always adapting. Soon we'll have AI holographic teachers in every school and on every device, so the student has them always. A mentor that grows up with them. An AI companion that actually has their best interest at heart because it has no ego, no ideology, no sexual impulse, no bad day to take out on a kid.
I have talked about this repeatedly, but Harvard conducted a informal study in 2024, look it up, students with AI as a coach learned and retained information at twice and nearly three times the rate.
The cost of knowledge is now zero. A child can access any knowledge instantly, school is no longer the gateway. So what's left? What's the value proposition of the current system?
Here's the honest answer: there isn't one.
Colleges are done for in the next 18-24 months. Unless young people just want the social experience, or parents need a babysitter, but that's a lot of money to pay for social. Kids will learn at hyper speed and apply that learning even faster. The bad news for teachers as we know them? They're done. They'll be let go as education transforms or they will become augmented and join with AI avatars and teaching to make the students learning journey truly dynamic.
So, here's the merged hope.
New forms of human-skilled educators will rise up as true mentors. Wisdom transfer experts. Human development trainers. People who are augmented with AI skills and taught real human skills, communication, discernment, leadership, emotional intelligence. No more babysitter model. No more warehouse for kids while parents work. Actual development of human potential.
We desperately need AI coaches in the classroom and on devices. Holographic mentors. Avatars that go home with students and continue the learning. And we need human mentors who have been vetted, trained, and held to a standard that the current system has utterly failed to maintain. Yeah we need those damn armed robots too.
The teachers who survive this transition will be the ones who were never about content anyway. They were about activation, seeing a kid and making them feel seen. Transferring wisdom, not just information. Developing humans, not processing them. They are out there, just not in high numbers. We need them now.
That's not a job AI takes. That's a job AI reveals.
We are in a new game. And you cannot unlock the new doors with old keys.
About Me:
I'm Mitch Mitchem, and I've trained over 60,000 people on human-centered AI implementation. I've given 3,400+ presentations across 12 countries. I've worked with Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and everyone in between. But none of that matters as much as this: I'm a father. And I will never stop fighting for a system that actually protects and develops our children.
The friction in education is killing our kids, sometimes literally. It's time to F*ck the Friction and build something better.
