Rethinking Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: What and How We Teach and Learn

The rapid advancement of generative AI and large language models challenges long‑held assumptions about the purposes, content, methods, and practices of education. This paper integrates historical educational philosophy with contemporary AI capabilities to present a comprehensive framework for rethinking what and how we teach and learn. Drawing on foundational purposes—moral formation, democratic citizenship, critical emancipation, human capital development, and holistic flourishing—we analyse how AI's strengths (pattern recognition, content generation) and limitations (lack of understanding, moral agency, empathy, metacognition) reshape educational priorities. We propose a curriculum of six human‑irreplaceable competencies: algorithmic literacy, ethical judgment, creative abduction, metacognition, emotional intelligence, and systems thinking. For learners, we identify five core skills: learning to learn, judge, create, relate, and be. Pedagogically, we advocate cognitive apprenticeship, problem‑based learning, dialogic instruction, authentic assessment, and teacher vulnerability. A central contribution of this paper is the explicit requirement that students be prepared for two complementary workplace realities: collaborative co‑work with AI and independent, AI‑free performance in case AI suddenly becomes unavailable. Consequently, the curriculum and pedagogy must be redesigned to cultivate full capabilities for independent living and working in a modern society. To this end, we introduce strict ethical guardrails: students may use AI to manage their learning but must never delegate coursework to AI; human educators may use AI to create content and assess students, but only responsibly and ethically. For students, we outline practices of prompting‑critiquing‑synthesising, attention management, reflection, collaboration, questioning, and productive struggle. The paper concludes that the AI era demands not the abandonment of traditional educational aims but their recalibration toward uniquely human capacities, with teachers and learners becoming co‑inquirers in an AI‑augmented but human‑centred ecosystem.