Authors: Ju-Ho Lee and Yoon Soo Park

The rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming not only how students learn, but what learning is for: across education systems, AI now performs many cognitive tasks that once justified schooling, including information retrieval, routine analysis, and standardized problem-solving. Policy discussions have largely continued to focus on how AI can improve efficiency, through personalized instruction, automated assessment, and expanded access to information. Yet, these discussions often overlook a more fundamental question. As AI systems increasingly generate answers, shape attention, and optimize decisions, the core educational risk is no longer skill decay alone, but the erosion of human agency. Education systems now face an urgent challenge – integrating learning environments to cultivate human wellbeing and broader competencies in judgment, responsibility, resilience, and meaning in an AI-mediated world.

In today’s classrooms, students are spending unprecedented amounts of time in digital environments that require limited physical movement and fewer sustained, human interactions. Learning and socialization are increasingly sourced through screens rather than embodied, relational human experiences. Across regions and income contexts, education leaders report rising concerns about student stress, disengagement, and declining wellbeing. These trends point to a growing gap between what education systems prioritize and what societies increasingly require from learning in the AI era.

For policymakers and educators, this moment represents a strategic inflection point. Education systems are being asked to prepare learners not only for evolving labor markets, but for responsible participation in complex, AI-mediated societies. Meeting this challenge requires a renewed focus on Learning for Human Flourishing, the sustained capacity to learn, judge, and act meaningfully over time.

System Constraints at the Heart of Education Reform

Despite widespread recognition of these challenges, education systems remain constrained by how success is defined and measured. Accountability frameworks continue to prioritize narrow academic indicators because they are standardized, scalable, and administratively tractable. As a result, cognitive performance, often reduced to standardized test scores, has become the dominant signal shaping policy decisions, resource allocation, and system incentives.

This emphasis has produced unintended consequences. Broader sets of non-cognitive competencies, including judgment, ethical reasoning, and socioemotional growth, as well as student wellbeing are widely acknowledged as important; yet they remain weakly embedded in system design. Lacking shared definitions, common language, and credible signals, these dimensions of learning struggle to influence policy decisions at scale.

The costs of this misalignment are increasingly visible. Students experiencing stress, disengagement, or digital overload often remain invisible to systems until challenges become acute. Educators are expected to support holistic development but are rarely provided with system-level information that enables early identification and targeted support. Learners from marginalized communities who often rely most on schools for stability, belonging, and protection are disproportionately affected when wellbeing and non-cognitive development are treated as secondary concerns.

In an AI-rich environment, this constraint becomes even more consequential. As AI-based intelligent systems increasingly shape attention, decision-making, and knowledge production, the central educational risk is no longer skill obsolescence alone. It is the erosionof human agency – the inability to make value-informed decisions, regulate one’s actions, and act responsibly toward others. Without clearer system signals aligned to these capacities, education policy risks reinforcing outdated definitions of success at precisely the moment when broader mechanisms are required.

Elevating Learning for Human Flourishing

Evidence from education, psychology, public health, and workforce development increasingly converges on a common insight: learning for human flourishing depends on the interaction of multiple dimensions of human development. Approaches that treat these dimensions in isolation limit system effectiveness and obscure important policy levers. A more integrated approach to learning for human flourishing foregrounds three mutually reinforcing domains:

  • Cognitive development remains essential, but its purpose must be reframed for the AI era. Beyond content mastery, this domain emphasizes intellectual agency, the capacity to frame problems, think critically and creatively, sustain learning motivation, and collaborate productively with digital tools. As AI systems generate information and solutions, learners must be supported to interpret, question, and guide these outputs rather than consume them passively.
  • Non-cognitive competency development encompasses the moral, ethical, and socioemotional capacities that shape judgment and responsibility. These include emotional regulation, empathy, character, digital citizenship, and a sense of belonging. In digitally mediated environments, where social cues are altered and ethical dilemmas are amplified, these capacities are central to learning that supports human flourishing rather than dependency or disengagement.
  • Wellbeing and resilience provide the foundation for sustainable learning over time. Physical health, mental wellbeing, stress management, and digital self-regulation enable attention, emotional balance, and persistence. Evidence consistently shows that learning deteriorates when wellbeing is compromised. In this sense, wellbeing is not a competing priority but a necessary condition for educational success.

These domains are interdependent. Cognitive development relies on wellbeing; ethical judgment depends on emotional regulation; resilience supports lifelong learning. Policy approaches that isolate these elements risk undermining the very outcomes they seek to improve.

From Framework to Action – Prioritizing Better Measurement for Learning

If learning for human flourishing is to move from aspiration to action, education systems require measurement approaches that make these priorities visible, actionable, and credible. Most existing indicators were designed for accountability rather than improvement. While they offer comparability, they provide limited insights into how learners are developing judgment, resilience, ethical responsibility, or wellbeing over time. As a result, some of the most consequential dimensions of human development remain weakly signaled in policy processes.

This gap matters because what education systems measure powerfully shapes what they prioritize. Without better tools, policymakers risk steering systems using partial and outdated signals. More effective approaches emphasize diagnostic measurement –tools designed to support learning, adaptation, and formative improvement. Diagnostic measures can provide timely, formative insight into patterns of engagement, stress, belonging, and non-cognitive growth, enabling educators and system leaders to identify emerging risks before they become entrenched. When designed to return meaningful feedback to schools and learners, such tools strengthen the connection between evidence and action, supporting targeted interventions and continuous improvement at scale.

Complementing this local focus, a global human flourishing index may be developed to operationalizemeasurement at the system level. Using aggregated data, the index enables benchmarking and normative comparison across regions and countries. Its purpose is not to rank individuals or schools, but to support international learning and evidence-informed policymaking. By moving beyond narrow academic metrics, the index offers a holistic lens for comparing education systems and examining how different policy choices shape cognitive development, character, and well-being in the AI era.

Prioritizing measurement for learning offers a practical pathway to embed human flourishing within education system governance and to ensure that commitments to holistic development translate into sustained, system-level change.

Implications for Policymakers and Global Partners

For senior decision-makers, the implication is not that education systems need more indicators, but that they need more meaningful signals. Narrow metrics can distort incentives and obscure system vulnerabilities. By contrast, well-designed diagnostic information can support early intervention, inform professional development for educators, and improve coordination across sectors. And as such, investing in better diagnostic measurement is therefore a strategic choice and an investment for the next generation.

At the national and international levels, aggregated insights can strengthen system learning without resorting to simplistic rankings. Examining how different policy choices influence learning and human flourishing enables governments to learn from one another while respecting contextual diversity. For funders and global partners, this creates opportunities to align investments with long-term human development rather than short-term performance gains.

These considerations are especially salient for education workforce policy. As AI reshapes teaching and learning, educators’ professional judgment becomes increasingly important. Systems that clarify priorities and provide coherent signals enable educators to exercise that judgment effectively, rather than constraining it through narrow accountability pressures.

Redefining Success around Learning for Human Flourishing

As AI continues to advance, education systems face a defining governance challenge. The question is not whether technology will shape learning, but whether systems will articulate a clear vision of the human capacities that learning is meant to cultivate.

Redefining success around learning for human flourishing offers a strategic response. It aligns education systems with the realities of digital life, foregrounds access, and reinforces government leadership in stewarding long-term human development. For policymakers and global partners, this is not a peripheral agenda. It is central to ensuring that education systems equip individuals and societies to learn, decide, and act responsibly in an increasingly AI-mediated world.

Education systems need to cultivate human agency alongside the growing efficiencies in AI. Learning for human flourishing must therefore move from aspiration to organizing principle, guiding how systems define success, allocate resources, and evaluate progress in the years ahead.

Ju-Ho Lee, PhD is Professor, Korea Development Institute (KDI) School of Public Policy and Management; Former Acting President and Minister of Education, The Republic of Korea.
Yoon Soo Park, PhD is Ilene B. Harris Endowed Professor and Department Head of Medical Education, University of Illinois College of Medicine, USA