The Role of Educators in the AI Era: Teaching Students What to Ask

When ChatGPT first emerged, I was sitting in a meeting with my faculty colleagues at MIT. The energy in the room was tense… while some were fascinated, others were fearful. The concern was clear: If students now have instant access to answers, what becomes of educators?

I remember saying then, and I still believe now:

“Our role as educators isn’t to provide answers. It’s to help our students learn which questions to ask.”

That statement has only grown more true with time.

Answers Are Abundant — Questions Are the Scarce Resource

Technology has always evolved to make information more accessible. Books. Libraries. The Internet. Search engines. And now, large language models like ChatGPT, which don’t just deliver information, but expertise.

But there’s something technology still cannot do for us: it cannot yet decide what matters. It cannot define which questions to ask when or why they’re worth exploring.

That’s where educators come in. Our job isn’t diminished by AI, instead it’s transformed. We’re no longer the gatekeepers of answers. We’re the cultivators of curiosity. Curiosity is a key skills that I was encouraged to consider in the AI era over lunch by Dr. Alejandro Hernández Delgado, the Provost of ITAM, in Mexico City earlier this month.

The Calculator Analogy

When I was growing up, my math teachers used to say, “You need to learn the fundamentals — you won’t always have a calculator in your pocket.” That was before smartphones.

Today, we have not only a calculator in our pockets but supercomputers that function as a calculator, encyclopedia, web browser, and interface to the collective intelligence of the world’s most advanced AI systems.

Yet despite this, the fundamentals still matter. What those teachers really taught me wasn’t how to calculate — it was how to know what to calculate.

They taught context, reasoning, and the ability to interpret what a number means once it’s produced. The calculator didn’t make math obsolete; it made mathematical thinking more important than ever.

The same is true for AI.

AI Is the New Calculator

AI is the next evolution of the calculator… a cognitive calculator. It extends our capacity to think, reason, and create. But just as the calculator required us to know what to input, AI requires us to know what to ask.

The danger isn’t that students will “cheat” by using AI. The danger is that they’ll stop thinking critically about how they use it.

Education must now teach both the fundamentals and the frameworks for prompting, evaluating, and applying AI outputs. Not AI plus fundamentals but AI(Fundamentals). Integrated, inseparable, and purposefully designed.

An Example: JetPack at MIT

One example of this integrated model is the JetPack tool I oversaw the development of at MIT. JetPack fuses the power of large language models with the first principles of entrepreneurship (the fundamentals).

It’s not a generic chatbot that just “answers” questions. It’s structured to guide learners through the reasoning process that underlies entrepreneurial thinking: hypothesis formation, testing assumptions, understanding customers, evaluating risk, and designing experiments.

In essence, it’s a calculator for entrepreneurship, but instead of adding numbers, it helps students add insight. It’s pre-programmed with the mental models of entrepreneurial success, allowing students to accelerate their learning without skipping the fundamentals.

The Educator’s Challenge: Evolve the Equation

Many educators today feel pressure to “do something with AI.” Too often, that translates to a shallow integration such as prompting students to “Ask ChatGPT.”

That’s not the future of education. That’s outsourcing it.

The future is intentional integration with educators designing learning experiences where AI becomes a living, contextual layer within the fundamentals themselves. Where students don’t just ask AI for answers but learn how to think with it.

To do that, we as educators must upskill. We must understand these tools deeply enough to teach their effective use, to model curiosity, and to reimagine how fundamentals are taught in this new world. While difficult to upskill given the time investment required and the limited time remaining after a busy day of teaching, grading, and mentoring students, administrators must carve out this time and incentivize it to ensure that students today are prepared for their tomorrow.

The Call to Educators

The role of educators in the AI era isn’t to compete with technology rather it’s to collaborate with it, and to guide students in doing the same.

We are not obsolete. We are indispensable. But only if we evolve.

So here’s the challenge: Don’t teach AI + fundamentals. Teach AI(fundamentals).

Help your students learn not just to find answers, but to shape better questions.