*Structural constraints.* Education develops the capacities the political community presupposes participants to have, so on that account it is constitutive infrastructure on the same logic as healthcare and the justice system, and privatizing the floor of education (leaving baseline access to capability development to market mechanisms) is precluded at the structural-design level; the framing of education-as-constitutive-infrastructure that grounds this constraint is contested at its premise by Friedman's voucher tradition (*Capitalism and Freedom* 1962), the libertarian parental-authority tradition, and Illich's deschooling critique (*Deschooling Society* 1971), and those traditions are engaged at section length in [§9.9.1](<9.9.1 What is Disputed.md>), so the constraint stated here applies under that engagement. The design target is capability development, not credentialing-only: a system has to develop the capacities, not merely issue credentials that signal them, so designs that optimize for credential-issuance over capability-development violate the constraint at scale: the constraint does not preclude credentials, which have legitimate signaling functions, but precludes credentialing-without-capability as the system's primary output. Student-debt-as-extraction is precluded: financing higher education primarily through individual debt at scales the empirical record displays (above earnings-recovery capacity for substantial subgroups) is structural extraction at the developmental interface, and while various models satisfy the alternative constraint (free public higher education; income-share agreements with structural protections; collective-investment funding through general taxation), the framework precludes the debt-extraction model at scale without picking among the alternatives. And early-childhood investment is a structural-priority constraint, the Heckman-curve confirmation making under-investment at this developmental period the costliest per-dollar-foregone of any educational under-investment, the framework deriving the priority from the developmental account and the empirical record confirming it.

*Cross-domain couplings.* Education couples upstream into representation ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)) and economy ([§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>)): capability disparities propagate into recognition capacity (an electorate underdeveloped in the capacities representation requires cannot recognize direction accurately) and into economic distribution, where capability disparities become earnings disparities become extraction-tolerance shifts, so educational reform without attention to these downstream couplings underperforms. It couples downstream into healthcare ([§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>)) and justice ([§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>)), the downstream-cost predictions and confirmations tracing the coupling: healthcare and justice burdens are partly downstream of educational under-investment, so redirecting educational investment is a healthcare-and-justice intervention as much as an educational one. And it couples to the information environment ([§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>)): a well-educated population is structurally more resistant to disinformation and the public-school system is itself a public-square infrastructure component on the framework's terms, so educational under-investment is information-environment under-investment by the same logic.

*Field-engagement.* The framework does not endorse a specific schooling-design: public-school monopoly, public-school-with-charters, voucher systems, and hybrid public-private architectures can each satisfy or violate the constitutive-infrastructure constraint depending on calibration, the framework precluding designs that produce systematic stratification at scale or route the educational floor through profit-extracting substitutes without picking among framework-compatible alternatives. It does not pick a specific curriculum or pedagogy: capability-development is a structural-level constraint, and the implementation question (which capacities, at which developmental stages, through which pedagogical methods) is left to the educational-research literature and to local-community-and-population direction. Higher-education access reform is structurally derived, the student-debt-extraction preclusion entailing that current US-style higher-education financing requires reform while the framework leaves the specific path (free public higher education, debt-cancellation-and-restructuring, income-share-agreement-with-protection, mixed designs) to the implementation literature and representation processes. And the framework does not pathologize private education at small scale: private schools, religious schools, micro-school cooperatives, and homeschooling exist as legitimate alternatives within the educational ecology, the preclusion operating at the level of stratification at scale and of the educational floor occupying for-profit substitutes, so small-scale alternatives within a robust public floor satisfy the constraints.

*Cognitive diversity, relational capacity, and AI-tool use.* Cognitive diversity is a structural resource, not a liability to accommodate. Because the conditions of participation are for everyone, a shared structure designed around a single cognitive template denies subjects whose architecture diverges the participation conditions they are structurally owed — not through overt exclusion, but through a design that never asks whether the threshold could be configured differently. The resource argument also runs in the other direction: a structure that harnesses the full range of cognitive architectures solves more problems than one selecting for a single style. Classroom architectures, assessment regimes, pacing, and credentialing pathways therefore need to be configured for the actual range of cognitive architectures the population has rather than the narrow template industrial-era schooling was organized around. Relational-capacity education belongs in the curriculum for the same reason. Civic and economic life are made of people dealing with one another, so communication, conflict navigation, recognizing manipulation, setting limits, repair, grief, and recognizing patterns in relationships are foundational capacities for participation — not soft skills added after “real” education. Explicit instruction in them (drawing on Gottman's pattern-identification work, Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication framework, attachment-informed pedagogy, and broader research on relational competence) belongs from early ages as part of a wellbeing-and-relations competency, not as an extracurricular add-on. The framework's account also derives a specific implication for AI-tool use. The failure mode is not using AI to solve problems but using AI to bypass the modeling: handing the cognitive work to the tool rather than doing it. The test is whether the subject can explain the problem, evaluate the solution, and understand what it means. A subject who uses AI to extend their reach while still doing the modeling is doing what problem-solving education is for; one who hands off the cognitive work and claims credit for the output has produced an artifact, not solved a problem. Institutional design should therefore ask whether genuine participation in the cognitive work is present, and assessment regimes should register that distinction rather than gatekeep particular cognitive styles.

What the framework leaves underdetermined is a specific schooling-design among framework-compatible alternatives, the curricular content beyond the capability-development constraint, the pedagogical methods, the higher-education-financing architecture beyond the debt-extraction-at-scale preclusion, the testing-and-assessment systems beyond the credentialing-only preclusion, the calibration of public-school, charter, voucher, and private-alternative components in any given polity, the teacher-credentialing, certification, and compensation architectures, and the reform paths from current configurations to framework-compatible alternatives. Where multiple designs satisfy the constraints, the framework leaves the choice to the design literatures, the empirical record, and the recognized direction of the population through [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) (Representation).

Boiled down, the [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>) argument across its five subsections holds a single thesis: education is capability development for participation, and the structural commitment covers the full range of capacities participation actually requires (cognitive, informational, relational, and civic) not only the narrower domain of content-knowledge that industrial-era schooling was organized around. The confirmation record shows that the Heckman-curve pattern, the stratification-under-privatization pattern, and the debt-extraction pattern are all structural predictions the empirical literature confirms; the framework-compatible alternatives, from Finland's transversal-competency curriculum to the deliberative-polling record, have documented outcomes rather than merely theoretical standing. The institutional-design implications are priority-structured by the developmental account: early-childhood investment comes first, relational and civic capacity development belongs throughout, and the credentialing-without-capability model is precluded at every level regardless of which framework-compatible alternative replaces it.


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← [9.9.4 What is Confirmed](<9.9.4 What is Confirmed.md>) | [9.10 Healthcare](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) →
