The Intellectual Genealogy of Education 6.0: A Critical Review of Pedagogical, Epistemic, and Technological Frameworks

Education 6.0 has emerged as a conceptual orientation through which scholars explore the future of education in contexts shaped by artificial intelligence (AI), adaptive learning, human–machine collaboration, epistemic pluralism, and complex societal transformation. Yet the growing use of the label raises important questions concerning its intellectual genealogy, conceptual coherence, and relationship to earlier educational paradigms. This critical review examines selected publications from 2023 to 2026 to reconstruct the documented development of Education 6.0, distinguish its principal conceptual strands, and identify directions for theoretical and empirical research. Particular attention is given to Pitshou Moleka’s 2023 publications, including Dispelling the Limitations of Education 5.0 and Outlining the Vision of Education 6.0 and Exploring the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Education 6.0: Enhancing Personalized Learning and Adaptive Pedagogy. The review also considers subsequent contributions addressing AI-enabled personalization, human-centred educational technology, interdisciplinary learning, cultural knowledge, and ethical governance. It argues that Education 6.0 should not be treated as a universally standardized model but as an emerging and internally differentiated conceptual field. The review proposes a five-dimensional analytical framework encompassing pedagogical adaptability, human agency, ethical governance, epistemic pluralism, and systemic sustainability. This framework offers a basis for comparing competing formulations and designing empirical studies. The review identifies Moleka’s 2023 publications as documented early contributions to the conceptual development of Education 6.0, while recognizing that establishing exclusive intellectual priority would require a broader and reproducible examination of antecedent literature.