Educational policy turns adversarial over what education is *for*, and over whether the political community has structural obligations to develop the capacities its participants need to take up the participation conditions [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) derives. The framework's recognition tradition reads education as the shared infrastructure through which the political community prepares the population that is going to participate in it: capability development covering the full range of capacities participation actually requires, organized around bringing every participant to the modeling threshold rather than around credential issuance. Three contemporary traditions deny this framing at its premise from different directions.

The Friedman voucher tradition (Friedman 1962; Friedman and Friedman 1980; the contemporary school-choice movement through Caroline Hoxby and the charter-school empirical literature) presses the financing-versus-provision distinction: universal access can be delivered through state-financed vouchers to families who choose among competing providers, and the framework's collapse of state-financing into state-provision misreads the actual policy question. The market-discipline-through-choice mechanism is on this reading the structurally-sound delivery architecture for an educational floor that the framework otherwise grants is required.

The libertarian parental-authority tradition (Rothbard 1971; the contemporary Home School Legal Defense Association literature; the broader homeschool and unschooling movement) presses the domain claim: education is the parental-authority domain, not the political community's, and compulsory state schooling overrides a family-formation function the family is structurally placed to perform. Where the framework derives education-as-shared-infrastructure, this tradition reads it as state-overreach against a constitutive private sphere.

The Illich deschooling critique (Illich 1971; Freire 1968 at its sharpest reading of credentialing; Bourdieu and Passeron 1970 on cultural-capital reproduction) presses the credentialing-as-extraction critique from the opposite political direction: schools function structurally as credentialing apparatuses reproducing class hierarchy rather than as developers of the participation conditions the framework names, and the framework's defense of public education-as-infrastructure underestimates how much of the institution operates as extraction.

The recognition tradition the section operates within reaches the opposite destination on multiple independent grounds. The common-school tradition (Mann 1848; the universal-public-education lineage through Jane Addams and the Settlement movement) located universal access in democratic-republican premises but tracked a real structural obligation to develop civic-and-cognitive capacities for participation. The Deweyan democratic-education tradition (Dewey 1899, 1916) reaches education-as-shared-infrastructure through the question of which capacities democratic participation requires. Freire (1968) reaches capability development through critical-consciousness pedagogy, against banking-model education. The capabilities tradition (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2011) supplies the structural-floor architecture: institutions are constrained to maintain the capabilities participation requires across the full population. The sociology-of-education tradition (Bowles and Gintis 1976; Bourdieu on cultural capital; Lareau 2003) documents the stratification patterns the framework's anti-extraction architecture is designed against. The developmental-psychology tradition (Lev Vygotsky on the zone of proximal development; Jean Piaget on developmental stages; Erik Erikson on developmental periods) supplies the capability-development account at the cognitive-architecture level. The Heckman early-childhood-economics tradition (Heckman 2006, 2013; Heckman and Masterov 2007 on the return-on-investment curve) documents the structural-priority case for early-childhood investment. The Finnish National Core Curriculum tradition (Finnish National Core Curriculum 2016 on transversal competencies; Sahlberg 2011) is the operational instance of an integrated transversal-competency architecture. The relational-competence research tradition (John Gottman on relational-pattern identification; Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication framework; John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth on attachment) supplies the relational-capacity-as-curriculum case.

The dispute the section frames is whether educational obligation can be reduced to a financing-mechanism question (vouchers versus state provision), a parental-authority defense against compulsory schooling, or a wholesale critique of credentialing-as-extraction with the deschooling conclusion (theses pressed by Friedman, by the Rothbard-tradition libertarian parental-authority literature, and by Illich) or whether education is shared infrastructure for capability development covering the full range of capacities participation actually requires, with stratification at scale and debt-extraction at the higher-education interface as structural failure modes the framework derives against, a thesis pressed by the Mann-Dewey-Freire-Sen-Nussbaum-Heckman lineage through the Finnish operational record and the developmental-and-relational-competence research. What education must deliver to count as education under a political community whose participation conditions presuppose developed capacities across the population is fixed at [§9.9.2](<9.9.2 What is Required.md>) by the structural-necessity derivation, built on the [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>) / [§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>) / [§8.8](<8.8 Meaning.md>) / [§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>) grounding. *Thus the question stands disputed.*


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← [9.9 Education](<9.9 Education.md>) | [9.9.2 What is Required](<9.9.2 What is Required.md>) →
