Generation Alpha and Artificial Intelligence: An Integrative Review of Behaviour, Relationality, and the Purposes of Education

Generation Alpha, children born from roughly 2010 to 2024, is the first cohort to grow up with artificial intelligence (AI) as part of everyday life. Writing about this cohort tends to list traits without examining their evidential basis, or to treat the generation as a settled category. This integrative review draws on peer-reviewed studies and OECD, UNESCO, and UNICEF documents, mostly from 2019 to 2026, and sorts them into six behavioural domains: digital, learning, cognitive, social, emotional, and ethical. AI here means conversational agents, adaptive platforms, recommendation systems and robots. Three philosophical questions follow. Following Mannheim, Generation Alpha is at present a generation location, not a generation in the full sense. Drawing on relational artefacts and the onlife condition, social behaviour, including young children’s attachment to conversational agents, is proposed as a possible link between digital exposure and emotional and ethical development, a suggested connection weakly supported by current evidence. Drawing on Biesta and Mezirow, the review asks what education is for when adaptive systems optimise measurable learning. It offers a taxonomy, an appraisal of evidence and an ecological framework, and concludes that AI in schooling should be judged by its contribution to socialisation and subjectification as well as qualification.