Earlier this year I sat in a room in Melbourne with philosophers, policymakers, technologists, educators and artists, all gathered under the banner of one question: what does wisdom and action look like in an age of artificial intelligence?

The Wisdom and Action Forum, convened by Small Giants Academy, was not a technology conference. It was a sustained conversation about what we owe to the next generation as AI reshapes the fabric of daily life, and what it means for education when the tools we built have begun to think alongside us, and sometimes instead of us.

I attended representing the Fogarty Foundation, with our work on AI and education in Western Australia firmly in mind. I left with one idea ringing louder than all the others: that the most important thing we can give young people right now is not just familiarity with AI tools and literacy, but the civic muscle to shape the world those tools are building.

The education sessions at the forum were honest about the scale of the challenge. AI is questioning whether university-level education is relevant in its current form. Schools are grappling simultaneously with utopia and dystopia, often without the frameworks, resources or confidence to navigate between them. However, with all that in mind, a reoccurring topic was collaborative design and consultation with young people as we make decisions for the future. The young people in our schools shouldn't be passive recipients of a technological future being decided elsewhere: they must become active authors.

This is where the concept of systems literacy becomes so important. Across many sessions, namely the talk by Audrey Tan who is Taiwan’s first digital minister, what emerged was a call for a more ambitious kind of education altogether: one that builds in young people the capacity to understand how the systems shaping their lives actually work. Including how decisions are made, through what processes and how they can access the opportunities to engage with these decisions. Civic knowledge and civic muscle in the next generation, as Audrey Tan put it, is vital.

That framing resonates deeply with what the Fogarty Foundation believes about education and equity. The students who most need this kind of formation are often the furthest from it. They are in communities where AI tools are arriving without the accompanying infrastructure of critical literacy or protective institutional support. The risk is not that some young people will be left behind in a technical sense. It is that the absence of civic capability will leave them without the tools to contest, question or reimagine the systems that will increasingly govern their opportunities.

A.C. Grayling's philosophical session offered the deepest version of what is at stake. The unconsidered life, he reminded us, is not a life worth living. The worst pedagogical crime, he also highlighted with directness, is talking too much: education must make room for young people to lead, to teach, to grow themselves and each other. This is the foundation on which civic muscle is built along with intellectual ambition and moral agency.

The forum left me even more excited about the Foundation's work, research and collaborations around how AI will impact Western Australian schools and students. It is about ensuring that the next generation of West Australians, wherever they grow up and whatever their starting point, has the knowledge, the confidence and the capability to be active participants in shaping the world they are inheriting as well as access the opportunities it will offer. The future is not inevitable; but closing the gap requires us to be as strategic, as ambitious and as student-centred as possible.

Laura Potts

Programs and Communications Manager