From the margins to the centre: how AI can transform education from the ground up

Abstract For decades, Australia’s education system has failed Indigenous students. This paper contends that nearly 40 years of policy initiatives have targeted the wrong problem. The core issue is not the absence of Indigenous content or cultural awareness, but an inherited educational architecture structurally incapable of serving diverse learners. We propose leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) explicitly aligned with the cultural interface—the dynamic intersection between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems—to reconstruct education from the ground up. Indigenous Rangers are identified as a critical test case. Working daily across multiple cultural and language groups, in remote contexts, and at the intersection of knowledge traditions, Rangers hold advanced, practice-based expertise largely unrecognised by existing systems. Their work offers ideal conditions to test whether AI-enabled learning architectures can deliver rigorous, credentialed education in settings that conventional approaches have long failed to serve, providing a pathway for addressing the wider crisis in Indigenous education.