Robots replacing teachers? Not in the Phl!
The problem with a little education is ignorance. This became very apparent at a supposed regional ICT summit conducted by the Department of Education. Many of the speakers were so enthralled by the prospects of ICT in the modern world they failed to see the reality on the ground. In particular, they were so gung-ho about a future of robots they began to see a future where artificial intelligence can actually replace teachers.
This is not to dispute such a future. In fact, such a future is already here, only that here is not the Philippines. In the Philippines, there is no such thing as a robot replacing a teacher, at least not in the foreseeable future. Why? Because the Philippines does not even have enough teachers to replace with robots in the first place.
And why are there not enough teachers in the Philippines? Because the DepEd does not have the money for salaries enticing enough to make students want to take up teaching so that they can be replaced with robots one day. In fact, the DepEd does not have enough money to print books for each student. In many schools all over the country, students have to share books at a ratio even robots will fail to comprehend.
And then there is the utter lack of classrooms, even to this day, and despite all the lies people are told that the backlog in classrooms is being addressed swiftly. And there lies another problem, because unlike robots that cannot reproduce, Filipinos are very prolific at making babies. With more than 110 million in population and counting, the Philippines is now the 11th most populous country in the world.
As these sprouting babies reach school age, the DepEd will be hard-pressed even more to provide them with the classrooms that even now they cannot sufficiently do so. But for the sake of the argument and the DepEd does come around to replacing teachers with robots, these robots, wired as they are to function in the most ideal of teaching conditions, will explode, burn and disintegrate from their inability to cope with the existing circumstances under which they are made to operate.
So it is perfectly okay to talk of a world so high tech and advanced from the perspective of a summit because that is what summits are. Even the recently-heldASEAN Summit was no different, enthralled as it was with a supposed code of conduct in the South China Sea with China, which in reality is a big ha ha. So it is with robots. Robots are too expensive for DepEd. And robots are too disciplined for the Philippines. They cannot move in a room of 70. They will rust under leaking roofs.