The rapid development of generative artifi cial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping the production, circulation, and learning of geographical knowledge, while also compelling geography education to re-anchor the purposes of learning and its educational value. Drawing on four relationships between learning and AI, this paper proposes the HEDGE geographical thinking framework. Rooted in geography and oriented towards education, the framework comprises five interrelated dimensions: human-centric thinking, epistemic thinking, deep thinking, generative thinking, and ethical thinking. HEDGE thinking calls on teachers to integrate knowing, doing, and being, and to support students of geography in becoming transformative agents with ethical awareness, creativity, empathy, and the agency to act. We argue that human beings are the heart of education: human beings are continually shaped through their choices and actions. Accordingly, geography teachers in the age of AI are not competing with AI; rather, they need to re-organise students’ relationships with AI in order to safeguard the educational value of geography education.