Duolingo’s CEO Just Came for Teachers.........And Missed the Point Entirely.

In early May, Luis von Ahn, the founder and CEO of Duolingo, said something on the "No Priors"podcast I have been stewing on for the past week. I have a lot to say about a lot of things, but this was so blinkered, so tech-bro confident in its disregard for human complexity, it managed to offend me greatly on behalf of teachers, parents, and anyone who’s ever spent a day inside a real school.

“I’m not sure there’s anything computers can’t really teach you,” he declared. The only reason schools won’t disappear entirely, at about 23mins in he argued later in the episode, is because “you still need childcare.”

And just like that, one of the most influential voices in educational technology flattened the role of a teacher to something between a babysitter and a UX hurdle. A nice-to-have, not a need-to-be. According to von Ahn, a future classroom looks like a room full of kids “Duolingo-ing,” supervised by adults who provide "emotional support" while the real learning happens on-screen.

If you’re a teacher, you already know what this gets wrong.

If you’re a parent who’s ever watched your child blossom because of a great teacher, or wither under the absence of one ,you know too.

AI can teach you to conjugate verbs. It can quiz you on the periodic table. It can tell you which math concept you haven’t mastered based on keystroke data and error patterns.

What it can’t do is smile at a child who feels invisible.

It can’t detect the edge in a student’s voice that signals a brewing crisis.

It can’t pause a lesson because the class is buzzing with tension after a fight at lunch and pivot the conversation to what it means to repair trust.

AI can’t look at a roomful of adolescents and decide, in the moment, that the plan for today doesn’t matter as much as what’s going on in their lives. AI can’t love your kid. The best teachers, the ones who change lives........teach from love.

What von Ahn is proposing isn’t education. It’s content delivery, and content delivery isn’t what school is for. Duolingo’s rise has been meteoric. With over 116 million monthly users, the company has turned bite-sized learning into a cultural staple. But what works in language acquisition apps isn’t education. It’s gamified behavioural conditioning. Von Ahn boasts that Duolingo has run over 16,000 A/B tests to fine-tune motivation. Running over 16,000 A/B tests means the company has treated its user base as a live experiment, constantly tweaking and optimising every aspect of the experience to make it more addictive, more "efficient," and more aligned with what keeps people coming back.

It’s behavioural science applied at scale not to deepen learning, but to maximise stickiness. And that’s the difference. A/B testing optimises for what works on a screen, not what works in a life. It can now tell you when you’re most likely to complete a lesson and how to keep you hooked. But none of this qualifies as a philosophy of learning. It’s a strategy for retention. What Duolingo teaches is compliance with a system. Not critical thinking. Not reasoning. Not how to sit with another person’s grief, or recognise coercion, or navigate ambiguity, or lead.

This isn’t the future. It’s a fantasy fuelled by money and the illusion of objectivity. Because no matter how much data you harvest, learning isn’t linear. Children aren’t machines. You don’t raise a good human with personalised reminders and dopamine hits. You don’t cultivate moral courage through perfect spacing algorithms. You don’t teach young people how to think by optimising their path to an answer.

The best teachers don’t just answer questions. They provoke them.

They teach children to live in questions, to sit with discomfort, to grapple with contradictions. AI can’t do that. Because it wasn’t designed to. Because it doesn’t understand stakes. Because it doesn’t have skin in the game.

Schools are not mere instruments of knowledge transfer. They are where kids learn how to be. How to stand up. How to belong. How to disagree without dehumanising. How to lose and recover. How to speak with purpose. These are not extras, they are the core of democratic life.

Teaching is not obsolete. It is irreplaceable.

The minute we allow tech to define education as an efficiency problem, we have already lost something precious: the understanding that school is sacred not because it teaches facts, but because it teaches people.

Let von Ahn have his scalable owl that fakes its own death..........I’ll take the teacher who sees my child. Who refuses to standardise their spirit. Who stands, not because it’s efficient, but because it matters.