Examining the Educational Legitimacy of AI Education Policies: Focusing on Educational Relationships

The purpose of this study is to examine South Korea’s artificial intelligence (AI) education policies not in terms of technical or institutional effectiveness—such as whether they function efficiently—but from the perspective of educational legitimacy, namely whether they are educationally desirable. Focusing on AI Digital Textbooks (AIDT), the study analyzes how current AI education policies conceptualize education and whether their underlying assumptions adequately reflect the distinctive logic and meaning of education. To this end, the study first reviews policy press releases and relevant literature to demonstrate that South Korea’s AI education policies, which center on personalized learning, are deeply grounded in what Gert Biesta critiques as learnification. Building on and extending Biesta’s discussion, the study then examines how learnification weakens the relational and practical dimensions of education by analyzing three aspects: teacher–student relationships, the classroom as an educational space, and the meaning of teaching. Through this analysis, the study explores how AI education policies tend to omit or reduce essential educational elements. The analysis shows that current AI education policies fail to sufficiently account for core dimensions of education, including the complexity of relational interactions, the practical dynamism of classrooms, and the transcendent and holistic nature of teaching. The study concludes by arguing that, for AI education policies to achieve educational legitimacy, they must move beyond technological excellence and be re-envisioned through new conceptual frameworks and educational imagination that foreground educational relationships, the classroom as an educational space, and the meaning of teaching.