Over the last two decades, online safety education has emerged as a new field of research focusing on concerns about a myriad of cyber risks. These risks range from online sexual exploitation through to the reproduction of social inequalities. The main assumption underlying this field is that online risks can be mitigated via educational interventions, and significant discrepancies can be observed between the proposed approaches to online safety education. In this article, we develop an analytical model based on prevalent concepts of digital citizenship and narratives of technologies to identify four different approaches to online safety education in the academic literature; that is, safeguarding, equipping, empowering and resisting. Each of these approaches draws on different assumptions on what constitutes as 'online risk' and 'digital education'. Through a systematic literature review, we analyse 75 journal articles and examine the approaches to online safety education that these studies adopt. Our analysis reveals a dominance of approaches that adopt limited concepts of digital citizenship and acritical views of technology.