I think we often view teaching as knowledge-in-knowledge-out, which is true for later grades. For early ones though, many teach how to be "human" as crazy as it sounds.

A great example would be handing a double sided worksheet to a child in 1st grade. A normal person may just hand the child the paper and pencil and tell them to go work on it. A teacher will teach the child where and how to write their name, to read instructions carefully, and to flip the paper over to check for more questions.

We often don't think about things like that, since we don't remember them at all.

I can imagine a future where AIs greatly enhance the paperwork, planning, etc. of teachers so that they can wholly focus on human to human interaction.

There's much more I'm missing here that teachers of younger grades do, but I hope my point has gotten across.

Teaching is a very hands on, front-line job. It's more like being a stage performer than a bureaucrat.

It's not a competitive field. Teachers won't get replaced as new, more efficient modes of learning become available.

Barely any western education system has adapted to the existence of the internet - still teaching facts and using repetitive learning where completely useless.

We got high quality online courses which should render most of high school and university useless but yet the system continue in the old tracks, almost unchanged. It's never been competitive and it's likely always been more about certification of traits rather than actual learning. Both - I think - are pointers towards rapid change being unlikely.

At least in the UK (and most western countries are similar), the government decides (with ministers) what the curriculum should be and how it will be assessed. They decided that rote learning is what students should do. The schools have no funding for anything innovative - again, a decision by the government on how much to allocate. They can barely afford text-books, let along support an edu-tech start-up ecosystem. VCs won't touch edu-tech with a barge pole. Meanwhile, the government assessors ensure that things are taught in a particular way. Again, decided by the government and the bureaucrats. The teachers have zero control over this.

Now universities should know better. They have more funding and more resources. But there are some leaders here, like MIT.

The only thing in your comment above I disagree with is the slight implication that education is underfunded in general.

Can't speak much about the UK but both the US and Germany (the ones I can speak about) put a shitload of money into education but manage to complete misallocate it. It isn't about the amount of pie, it's just the wrong pie.

A lot of subjects are literally self promoting nonsense without any sort of proven ROI. Haven't seen a western society with a school curriculum that would survive even the slightest bit of scrutiny.

Of course this isn't the teachers job to fix but obviously if one were to try and optimize this system, you'd start by fixing obvious flaws in allocation - as that's an even lower hanging fruit than technology. They completely failed to optimize both and I don't see any reason this would change now unless there's a collapse of the larger system.