Human-machine collaboration serves as the underlying logic of education in the intelligent era and constitutes the essence of digital education. However, numerous cognitive misconceptions and practical dilemmas persist in current human-machine collaborative education, urgently requiring theoretical clarification. Based on the conceptual interpretation of human-machine collaboration and the framework of activity theory, and in conjunction with the realities of human-machine collaborative education, this paper identified eight pairs of dialectical relationships: “subject and boundary, empowerment and disempowerment, generation and creation, centralization and decentralization, opposition and coupling, primary and secondary, mutual harm and mutual benefit, outcome and process”. The corresponding pivots for nevigating the eight relationships lay in properly managing “role positioning, application regulation, generative mechanism, responsibility and authority distribution, interdependence states, ontological differences, symbiotic logic, and interaction models” in human-machine collaborative education. Understanding the essence of human-machine collaboration, analyzing the connotations of the eight major relationships, and exploring the key mechanisms of human-machine collaborative education were conducive to further deepening the understanding of its inherent mechanism and practical logic.