Do you remember your first mentor? In the old days we used to call them role models. Mine was Ms. Rose in Grade 1. Outside of your immediate family, the first access to an adult mentor often was your Gr R or Grade 1 teacher. They are held in high esteem and often become the first knowledge-and-support anchor outside that of your parents or family members. I still remember when my daughter (turning 21 soon), came home around March month in Grade R to disagree with my opinion as her father, all because Ms. Kelly said something different. Ms. Kelly was a new dynamic in the household. This was an amazing experience and realisation as a parent that even though my daughter had exposure and access to many books, online, digital and TV resources, her Grade R teacher, Ms. Kelly, became her first mentor outside of our home. Mrs. Kelly has since been replaced with several other teachers and a few sport coaches, as she grew into a young dynamic strong-headed woman.
Decades later, as I train to become a Generative AI Specialist, I find myself asking: can technology ever replace what Ms. Rose gave me — human mentorship?”. This made me rethink the valuable mentorship role that digital access and more specifically AI is playing. But is it really? Can it replace human mentorship? And if so, should it?
How important is human touch in an algorithmic age?
I seem to have more questions than answers.
“Start with the end in mind” has always served me well in business but also in my personal life. Given this particular philosophy – my end conclusion is that human mentorship matters more now than ever before for today’s learner.
In a world increasingly shaped by algorithms, personalisation, automation, and artificial intelligence, it’s easy to assume that human guidance is becoming less essential. After all, AI tutors can now personalise lessons and study plans in real time, provide instant feedback, and even simulate an exam environment. It’s a 24-hour mentorship access. Yet amid this technological marvel, one truth remains stubbornly clear: learners still need human mentors — and I’m of the opinion, now more than ever.
Extensive research and real-world case studies show that Generative AI Tutor initiatives can meaningfully personalise learning. They have demonstrated success in addressing complex skills such as problem framing, critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity—especially in adult learning and workplace development. These examples prove that when designed well, AI can help learners grow beyond rote knowledge and toward deeper, more adaptive forms of thinking.
But for young school learners, no algorithm can replace the human mentor. Children need the emotional safety, empathy, and moral guidance that only real relationships can provide. Human mentorship is not a luxury in education; it is the foundation upon which confidence, curiosity, and resilience are built. In South Africa’s rapidly changing digital landscape, it remains our most powerful tool for change, hope, and collective strength. This argument rests on four key concepts:
- Beyond Information: The Human Context
AI can deliver information as well as context. But it often struggles to confer meaning. This include subjective as well as objective meaning. It can generate or edit an essay or generate a study plan, but it will struggle to help a learner navigate the messy, emotional, and often uncertain process of simply growing up. Developing as a young person is complex and influenced by several moving targets. Mentorship is not just about transferring knowledge; it’s about modeling curiosity, resilience, and empathy — qualities that define not only good learners, but good human beings.
Human interaction allows mentors such as teachers to read non-verbal cues and adapt their teaching style spontaneously, offering encouragement or constructive criticism tailored precisely to the learner’s immediate emotional and cognitive state. Learning success rates are more than double during a human learner-teacher relationship, based on empathy, compared to Generative AI personalised tutoring. A human mentor helps a young person see themselves not merely as a user of technology, but as a creator and shaper of it. In an age when digital systems can amplify bias, blur truth, push automated ethical boundaries and reward conformity, the human mentor plays a critical role in nurturing discernment, ethics, and a sense of purpose. Belonging, understanding, accepting and owning your differences are critical shaping fundamentals for growing up. Human mentorship plays an undeniable true-North role in navigating these unchartered waters for a young learner.
- AI as tool, not a teacher
It is vital to inspire purpose beyond performance metrics. It’s easy to view AI tools as teachers. Are they not indeed teaching us? The greatest educators are not threatened by AI; they are empowered by it. They use AI to offload repetitive tasks, improving their lives thereby freeing time for authentic human connection. The most valuable commodity in a classroom is time. Not only time to work through the lesson plan, but time for being available as a mentor for your learners. In some instances, the teacher is the only available mentor in their lives. In classrooms where access to technology via mobile devices is abundant, the rarest commodity is not access to data (or even cost) — it’s attention and understanding. It’s having time to establish hope.
Human mentors can interpret the “why” behind the “what.” They can read a learner’s mood, sense discouragement behind a silent screen, or spark confidence with a well-timed question. A good mentor connects a learner’s academic efforts to their personal aspirations and values, fostering intrinsic motivation, something standardised AI feedback loops often fail to achieve in the sense of being biased due to one sided input from the learner itself, resulting in AI affirming exactly what the learner wants to hear, which is not always the same as what they need to hear.
Those subtle, relational skills are what makes learning transformative rather than transactional. This is why the future are shaped by teachers daily in a classroom. Ironically, this includes the future of responsible and ethical usage of AI.
- Mentorship as the New Literacy
In the AI era, mentorship itself is becoming a form of literacy. The ability to form trusting human relationships, to seek personal guidance, to engage in intergenerational dialogue — these are the meta-skills that will determine whether young people can thrive amid constant change given the opportunities, and unknown pitfalls of technology Human mentorship can counter the risk of declining critical thinking skills.
Mentors guide learners through complex social dynamics and personal setbacks, thereby cultivating Emotional Intelligence (EQ), teaching empathy, resilience, and self-awareness. These are core foundational skills for navigating both interpersonal relationships and future professional challenges where EQ trumps pure data processing.
Schools that intentionally foster mentorship — through peer programs, teacher-student partnerships, and community engagement — are not resisting the future; they are future-proofing it. What a magical concept. They are teaching learners how to be deeply human in a digital world. It feels like the future of humanity depends on this simple sentence.
- A Call to Re-Humanise Education
While AI provides information, resources and effective tools, human mentors contextualise knowledge through lived experience, demonstrating nuanced ethical decision-making and critical thinking beyond algorithmic outputs, without the data being processed by trained models, classes, filters, encoders, decoders, discriminators etc. This human contextualised mentorship is crucial for responsible digital citizenship. As education systems race to integrate AI tools, we must ask the most critical question: What should never be automated? Human encouragement. Empathy. Moral judgement. Belonging. Celebrating differences. The art of helping a learner see possibility where they once saw only failure.
Who will do this?
A teacher!
The future of education will not be defined by the sophistication of our technologies, but by the strength of our human relationships. If AI is the catalyst of progress, human mentorship will be the compass — and without it, we risk moving quickly, but aimlessly. What might seem like progress, will in fact be isolation, fed by anxiety.
Keep encouraging those connections; they build the future leaders we need.
In the diverse socio-economic landscape of South Africa , it is vitally important that we take a step back, acknowledge that not all school leaners have access to digital AI tools. In an AI-driven world, human mentorship is not a luxury — it is the infrastructure of hope. As we innovate, let us not forget that every learner still needs someone who believes in them, beyond what any algorithm can predict. This brings me back to my first mentor, and my daughter’s first mention, our Foundation Phase teachers.
Teachers stand at the heart of our nation’s future. They are not only educators but human mentors shaping the next generation of thinkers and leaders. Their influence reaches far beyond classrooms — they nurture curiosity, build confidence, and model integrity in a world that often moves too fast for reflection.
From the Foundation Phase to the final years of schooling, teachers transform learning into an act of human connection. I still remember my first mentor, Ms. Rose, and later Ms. Kelly — reminders that education is not just about knowledge, but about kindness, courage, and belief in a child’s potential.
No technology can replace the steady presence of a teacher. They remain the moral and emotional anchors of our society.
About the Author: Jacques Breytenbach is the Head of Publishing at Maskew Miller Learning. He has a Masters in Business and most recently secured a qualification as a certified Generative AI Specialist.