To most people, teachers are authority figures first and employees second. Having worked on educational software for several years now I can tell you that, while most teachers are smart enough not to talk about it, they're all very aware of this fact.

So the worry probably isn't that teachers will be replaced by software. It's that availability of teaching software that's almost as good as some teachers will erode the social prestige held by all teachers.

That prestige has been a central feature of the American political landscape over the last few decades. From a survey I happend to have on my desktop, taken during the Wisconsin Union Thing a few weeks ago [1] [2].

    What's your overall opinion of:

    Teachers           73% pos  10% neg
    Teachers' Unions   47% pos  30% neg
    Other Unions       38% pos  35% neg
    Barack Obama       49% pos  35% neg

As a group, teachers enjoyed a 63-point spread between favorables and unfavorables during a coordinated attack in the national spotlight that went on for 3 weeks. Maybe a president enjoys that kind of popularity for a little while, right after winning a war, but not always.

If I were a teacher, I think a slogan like "[We] aim to make the world bad teacher-proof" would sound very ominous.

[1] http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/NEWS/A_Politics/_...

[2] This is a good time to point out that I'm trying to make this post politically neutral, because politics is first in the official list of topics best avoided on HN:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html