From Vnexpress:

Why spend huge money on English teaching centers?

As an English teacher in Vietnam, I have a vested interest in keeping the industry going.  Nevertheless, I sympathize with some of what this author is saying.  After all, I've chosen to try to learn Vietnamese through Duolingo instead of arranging for in-person lessons.  

...although at the same time, I'm well aware of the limitations of Duolingo.  It's good for vocabulary.  It's not so good for grammar (the explanations are lacking, and the program can't answer my grammar questions), and it's terrible for learning real communicative skills.  But it is something, and it is free, and it is right on my computer without me having to travel anywhere or arrange anything.

Anyway...

At my place of work, we frequently discuss over lunch just how long we have as a profession before we're all replaced by AI.  [I suspect the "how long before they replace us with AI" conversations are happening in a  lot of workplaces these days.  It's a sign of the uncertain times we live in.]

I have colleagues who think we are in imminent danger of being replaced.

My own view is that teaching English to adults might well be largely replaced by computers soon. (Actually,  I feel like this has already happened to a large degree.  When I first arrived in Vietnam years ago,  I used to teach a lot of adult classes in the evenings.  The market for adult English classes has largely dried up over the last few years.  Probably for a number of reasons, but the increased popularity of language learning apps is no doubt a big part of it.)

But teaching English to kids and teenagers will never be replaced by computers.  Kids and teenagers need a teacher in the room with them to guide them and motivate them.  Otherwise, they'll just play video games instead.

And if you think otherwise... you obviously don't have experience teaching kids.

I mean... we already ran this experiment, didn't we? We had a year of teaching online during the Covid shutdown.  In which the students were supposed to be learning everything from the computer.  And it was largely a failure.  Without the teacher in the room with them to guide them and make sure they were focused on the task (and not doing other things), they just didn't study.

In spite of this, the article I linked to above reads:

I think parents should also consider self-study for their children. The important thing is to get your children interested and know how to self-study, so that they can find information, documents, and tools on their own.

In the future, I will also let my children study on their own and not push them into language centers.

It's astonishing to me that someone could write an article like this just two years after the demonstrable failure of online education during the Covid shutdown, but then... the VNexpress is notorious for publishing a lot of nonsense.  

Addendum:

Freddie deBoer has written frequently on this topic over the years.  For his most recent piece on this topic, see his post from last week:

Sal Khan, Serial Education Revolutionary