For education to obtain at the scale of a political community whose participation conditions presuppose developed capacities across the population (articulating the institutional conditions under which every participant can be brought to the cognitive, informational, financial, technological, relational, and civic thresholds the framework's participation conditions require) the framework lays out a structural-necessity inventory specific to education as capability-development infrastructure. No one condition is optional; together they set the minimum educational architecture has to deliver (a floor, not an exhaustive specification) to count as educational architecture rather than as credential-issuance with selective capability-development as a byproduct.

*Universal access to capability development at the floor.* Every participant in the political community has access to the developmental conditions necessary to take up the participation conditions [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) derives. The condition holds at the floor: small-scale private alternatives (private schools, religious schools, micro-school cooperatives, homeschooling) remain legitimate within the educational ecology; what the framework precludes is stratification at scale or any architecture that routes the educational floor through profit-extracting substitutes that fail to deliver the capability-development the floor requires. Specific schooling-design among framework-compatible alternatives (public-school monopoly; public-school-with-charters; voucher systems with strong quality-floor regulation; hybrid public-private architectures) is underdetermined.

*Capability-development-not-credentialing-only as the design target.* The system must develop the capacities, not merely issue credentials that signal them. Designs that optimize for credential-issuance over capability-development violate the condition at scale. The condition does not preclude credentials (signaling has legitimate functions); it precludes credentialing-without-capability as the system's primary output. Assessment regimes have to register whether participants have crossed the modeling thresholds the capacities require, not merely whether they have moved content through short-term memory for retrieval.

*Curriculum coverage of the full range of participation-relevant capacities.* The capacities the framework derives as constitutive of participation include cognitive (the modeling capacity will rests on), informational (the capacity to evaluate claims and recognize manipulation), financial (the capacity to manage one's financial life within the economic structure [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) derives), technological (the capacity to navigate the technology that surrounds participation, not merely use it), relational (communication, conflict-navigation, manipulation recognition, limit-setting, repair, attachment-informed pattern-recognition: the foundational capacities that every cooperative arrangement is built on), and civic (the capacities recognition-and-direction [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) and [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) require). Each is required; together they are the minimum the curriculum has to cover: a floor, not a closed or exhaustive list. Specific pedagogical methods, sequencing, and developmental staging remain underdetermined within the constraint.

*Anti-stratification at scale and anti-extraction at the financing interface.* Educational architectures that produce systematic stratification at scale (capability disparities between tiers propagating into downstream representation, economic, and civic disparities) are precluded. Higher-education financing 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 is precluded. Various financing 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 and does not pick among the alternatives. For-profit-education channels that route public-loan dollars through marketing-as-instructional-value architectures with low completion and high default are precluded on the same logic.

*Early-childhood investment priority.* The Heckman-curve derivation (Heckman 2006; Heckman and Masterov 2007; Heckman 2013) makes early-childhood investment a structural-priority constraint: under-investment at this developmental period is the costliest per-dollar-foregone of any educational under-investment because the underlying capacities are most plastic and the returns compound across the longest downstream horizon. The framework derives the priority from the developmental account in [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>) / [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>) / [§8.8](<8.8 Meaning.md>); the empirical record confirms it. Specific early-childhood architectures (universal pre-K; home-visiting programs; integrated early-childhood-and-family-support architectures; subsidized high-quality childcare) remain underdetermined within the priority constraint.

*Cognitive-diversity accommodation as design constraint.* The conditions of participation are for everyone. Classroom architectures, assessment regimes, pacing, and credentialing pathways must be configured for the actual range of cognitive architectures the population has, not for the narrow industrial-era template. The condition treats neurodivergence (ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and other cognitive architectures that diverge from the dominant template) as variation within the participation standard rather than as deviation from it; the structural-mismatch-causes-harm pattern (the ADHD-and-elevated-mortality empirical record; Dalsgaard et al. 2015; Barkley 2015) is the cost signature of failing the condition. The condition does not preclude all standardized assessment; it precludes designs that treat one cognitive architecture as the participation standard and other architectures as failures to meet it.

*Tool-use registers the genuine-participation distinction.* As technology extends the cognitive reach available to participants, educational architectures must register the distinction between participants doing the modeling themselves while using tools to extend their reach (still modeling the problem, evaluating the solution, and understanding what it means) and participants who have handed the cognitive work to the tool while claiming credit for its output. The condition is genuine-participation-in-the-cognitive-work, not which-tools-are-permitted. Assessment regimes have to register that distinction at every developmental stage where tools are part of the cognitive environment. As tools extend further (AI; future cognitive-extension technologies), the condition extends with them.

Together, the conditions derived here are the minimum education as capability-development infrastructure structurally requires: each necessary, the set a floor rather than a closed specification, and open to extension as the framework develops. Those necessary conditions are the ones [§9.9.3](<9.9.3 What is Predicted.md>) builds its predictions on.


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← [9.9.1 What is Disputed](<9.9.1 What is Disputed.md>) | [9.9.3 What is Predicted](<9.9.3 What is Predicted.md>) →
