Informational education: Creating an understanding of justice

Introduction

How do we speak of information? The question is intended to elicit thoughts about, not just the nature of information (that is a monumental task), but its place (locus) in society. The foregoing sentence has actually introduced even more difficulties. There is an assumption that information can be somewhere. If information is presumed to be a ‘thing’, a tangible and substantive object, then it can exist in some place. A book can be on a shelf; a report can be placed on a desk; a data set can be stored on a compact disc. Beyond the trivial examples, information can reside in a server’s space and can be shared from that place. None of these actualities provide assistance to the thorny problems of information, the challenges that are meaningful in social life. Even limiting discussion to information in society is too large a pill to swallow. Attention here has to be paid to the contents and contexts of meaningful discourse in education. This attention requires acknowledging debts to two fundamental concepts. One can be found in Michel Foucault’s (1971) essay, ‘The Discourse on Language’. As he (1971: 224) warns, ‘Disciplines constitute a system of control in the production of discourse, fixing the limits through the action of an identity taking the form of a permanent reactivation of the rules.’ The other, even more to the point, is Pierre Boudieu et al.’s (1994: 4–5) caution relating to academic discourse: ‘there are few activities which consist so exclusive as teaching in the manipulation of words. … [L]earning implies both acquiring knowledge itself and the code of transmission used to convey a particular body of knowledge’.

The debts suggest a beginning – historical criticism that shapes the problematic of the present state of affairs. This is indeed the starting point, but it will not be the culmination of the present examination. Throughout this analysis the aim is identifying the necessary element of justice within an informational education (or an education that relies upon being genuinely informed, rather than on accumulating data). Justice can certainly entail concern for equality; education is a social process and a social good, so distribution and access play major roles. The concept of justice addressed also includes telos; education has purpose. The indefinite article is omitted here; it is more meaningful for analysis to say that education has purpose instead of saying that it has a purpose. The various implications of purpose will be examined as they relate to justice and the examination will lead to conclusions about those implications. Utility, welfare, freedom, distribution of benefits, procedures and virtues are included in the investigation.

To what extent does education depend on information? The answer to that question really does depend on determining what information is. For the purposes of examination the definition and theory provided by Budd (2011) will be used:

Information is meaningful communicative action that aims at truth claims and conditions … Information is comprised of those communicative actions (and only those communicative actions) that can be evaluated by a population—defined as the intended or potential hearers of the communication—as meaningful. Meaning is not limited to pure semantics, but includes context and history within evaluation. Further, information is true in that there is warrant for the communicative action, that this action includes no deliberate deception or omission, has inherent evaluative components, provides evidentiary justification, and is fundamental to ethics.

There are numerous writings on the place of information literacy in college education. Instilling in students an understanding of the meaning of secondary sources within the contexts of assignments and the learning objectives of courses is necessary. Ideas informed by the critical apprehension of what others have written and said demonstrate effective learning and help produce evidence of that learning. Information literacy, while necessary, is not sufficient. Educational programs permeated by critical informational scrutiny, acceptance or rejection, and re-formation enable students to engage actively in topics that are, and will continue to be, components of their lives. For example, Stromsø et al. (2011: 201–202) write, ‘To become full members of contemporary societies, students need to develop skills that make them capable of judging which information resources to trust’.

In this article a path to informational education is plotted. The resulting course is much more than the lecture and recitation model that once reigned in schools. Information, as defined and elaborated upon here, entails close involvement of all participation in educational endeavors. There must be open communication for learning to occur. As Budd (2011) says, the communicative element extends Prado’s (2006) idea of the tacit-realist stance regarding truth. Exchanges require real languages, signs and/or symbols for their existence. There is an aspect of communication, and communicative action in particular, that renders it integral to a definition that is useful – it is purposeful (Prado, 2006: 69). Ultimately, what is suggested here is a mode of educational action, a mode that entails work for teachers and students. The aim is not simply the ability of people to learn, the utility of obtaining an education, but locating learning and its outcomes in a structure of justice that extends to life within complex societies. If this aim can be achieved, the integration of the multifaceted experiences of learning, using information resources effectively, and completing a contextual task is realized (Lupton, 2008).

Kinds of justice

The foregoing may seem to be a bit of a strong claim; it requires some elaboration and defense. If welfare is one’s preferred form of justice one must argue cogently and forcefully in favor of it. ‘Welfare’, of course, can mean many things and can be defined in many ways. Complaints about ‘welfare states’ are frequently based on provisions of people of limited means, and perceptions that these people do little to alter their predicaments. That, of course, is a very particular and narrow definition of welfare. Throughout history there have been alternatives to the notion of welfare without desert, that is, without one somehow deserving what one obtains. Walzer (1983: 74) writes, ‘The chief rabbi of Castile was authorized to divert money from wealthy to impoverished communities in order to subsidize struggling schools.’ A just version of welfare is more than simply providing for the needy, and Walzer recognizes the dilemma. He (1983: 74) says, ‘individuals left to themselves. . ., will necessarily seek out other individuals for the sake of collective provision. They need too much from another’.

A considerable amount of thought on welfare focuses on the needs of those in society who are least able to provide for themselves. While that certainly is a necessary beginning, it is not sufficient as an end. Writers, such as Rousseau (1972), extend the idea of welfare to the practical act of the social contract. Rousseau, as a late Enlightenment thinker, was able both to build upon earlier work that examined science, humanity and the individual, and to give what had gone before a unique twist:

It is a great and beautiful spectacle to see man raising himself from nothingness by his own efforts; dissipating, with the light of his reason, the shadows in which nature enveloped him; lifting himself above himself; soaring in spirit up to the celestial regions; like the sun, traveling with giant steps through the vast extent of the universe; and what is still greater and more difficult, returning to himself, to study man and get to know his nature, his duties and his end. (1972: 52)

The welfare state, though, includes some serious limitation, and Rawls (1971, 1999) recognizes them in several of his works.

Another version for a just society is based in rights. This is a complex consideration since it can be connected to a variety of other ideas, including freedom and utility. It is not unusual to see Locke quoted when rights are involved, especially rights of ownership. In some ways of thinking about rights, mutual advantage (creating a system wherein rights are more than individual) is denied on the basis of libertarianism (Nozick, 1974). Also, there is some thought that associates right with labor, claiming that those who do not contribute to mutual advantage or societal good as a whole forego at least some consideration of rights. Even Marx and Engels (1968: 320) express skepticism regarding state creation of juridical equality; equality exists only insofar as people are workers who are entailed to equal treatment under an equal standard in that regard alone. Kymlicka (2002: 169–170) interprets Marx in this way: ‘Marx rejected the idea of equal rights, not because he was not a friend to the idea of treating people as equals, but precisely because he thought rights failed to live up to that ideal’.

Freedom can certainly constitute further contested ground. Only extreme libertarians see freedom as approaching an absolute; others envision limits to personal and collective freedom. Markets enter into the assessment that some writers make. Markets also introduce complications. Sandel (2009: 75) reminds us, ‘The case for free markets typically rests on two claims: one about freedom, the other about welfare. The first is the libertarian case for markets … The second is the utilitarian arguments for markets.’ Some specific freedoms are provided for constitutionally, in the USA and elsewhere. Even these freedoms, though, are not absolute. As US Supreme Court Justice Holmes famously said, one is prohibited from shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. The matter of freedom is so difficult that many prominent theorists can only speak of it in terms of other conceptions of justice or by way of specific examples. An expression of the complication is evident in the 1980s Western economics that emphasized supply side and trickle down mechanisms. These market ideas were attached rhetorically to distributive systems of welfare; the least well off would benefit if the most well off has few, or no, restrictions on their abilities to increase their wealth. The failure of the practice (growth in the numbers of the poor resulted) did not dissuade many policymakers from the attempted elimination of regulation in many public and private enterprises.

Reliance on markets for elements of such social goods as education leads to problematic assumptions and practices. Satz (2010) has recently examined market economies from a political philosophical framework. In stating market failure negatively she (2010: 48) writes, ‘failure to educate children produces public bads: less labor mobility, greater poverty, and less economic growth’. There is much more to the potential failure of education than producing a ‘public bad’ for society. An individual who has not had the opportunity to obtain a full education (an informational education) does not have some abilities that might otherwise enhance the person’s life – the ability to make wise choices, the wherewithal to develop a set of mature values, and the understanding needed to interpret the world (Satz, 2010: 48). These elements are essential to individual and social life, the material, emotional, and intellectual thriving. Market economics naturally creates differences; some people have resources that other people do not. The differences may be manifest in public policy, such as the privatization of services that benefit only those who can pay for them. As Satz (2010: 108) says, ‘When decision makers can buy private solutions for themselves in education, police protection, and even garbage collection, this may have problematic consequences for the public provision of these goods’.

One more way (among the variety of possible ways) of thinking about justice will be mentioned here. Sandel (2009) returns to Aristotle in trying to conceive of a system of justice grounded in virtues. Among other points, Sandel (2009: 186) says that virtues are teleological: ‘Defining rights requires us to figure out the telos (the purpose, end, or essential nature) of the social practice in question.’ He points out that thinking in terms of purpose is not very common today. In drawing from Aristotle, Sandel (2009: 192) reminds us that all forms of distributive purpose rely on some conception of purpose; what is at stake is just which conception of purpose prevails: ‘But Aristotle reminds us that all theories of distributive justice discriminate. The question is: Which discriminations are just? And the answer depends on the purpose of the activity in question’. This very brief overview of theories of justice can conclude with Sandel’s discussion of Aristotle intentionally; the core concepts will inform the discussion of justice and education. Sandel (2009: 199) writes, ‘First, the laws of the polis inculcate good habits. Form good character, and set us on the way to civic virtue. Second, the life of the citizen enables us to exercise capacities for deliberation and practical wisdom that would otherwise lie dormant.’

Information and justice

In order to connect the dots in this model of informational education the next step is to demonstrate that an efficacious definition must have justice at its core. In other words, information is more than communication (or it is a narrower species of the genus ‘communication’). The definition of information used here is quite a different one from extant alternatives. Information is not neutral; it is a good and it is something that can exist in unequal amounts and unequal qualities in society. If it were the case that information is not a scarce good then it would not be possible to speak of a digital divide. In fact, ‘digital divide’ is simply another expression that refers to inequalities that result from problems regarding justice. So information fits into Walzer’s (1983: 3) warning: ‘The idea of distributive justice has much to do with being and doing as with having, as much to do with production as with consumption, as much to do with identity and status as with land, capital, and personal possessions.’

It still remains to connect information and justice explicitly. Justice, as an essential component of political philosophy, has an axiological aspect; it is valued for the contributions it makes to an egalitarian society. Since utilitarianism as a theory of justice can be dismissed, it can also be dismissed as a theory of information. The value of what information is, what it means to people, and what it contributes to justice and education is not calculable in terms of utility. Freedom certainly is attached to information; there is a necessary liberty of access, but freedom is more than accessibility. In the same sense that freedom means absence of imprisonment, informational freedom means more than just the unfettered access to what is said, written, and shown. A genuinely free person has the ability to explore modes of identity and expressions of autonomy. An informationally (or intellectually) free person should have the wherewithal to explore difference, meaning, and truth. Information includes those elements, therefore it has purpose.

Transcending the absence of imprisonment and the mere access to information is an opportunity to realize the Aristotelian goal of the good life. In this way of thinking, every individual should have the opportunity to achieve the good life, but the good life may not manifest itself in the same way for all people. Sandel (2009: 203) interprets the Aristotelian stance: ‘For Aristotle, even consent against fair background conditions is not sufficient; for the work to be just, it has to be suited to the nature of the workers who perform it. Some jobs fail this test … In those cases, justice requires that the work be reorganized to accord with our nature.’ The position is at odds with Rawls’s viewpoint, which emphasizes, above all else, independent definition of the good according to rights that attend to all people at all times. The principle of rights has some merit, but it must be found wanting when the actual situations of people are considered.

There are two ways in which information enters the discussion about justice and education. By way of background, it should be noted that one of the ways is embedded in the mode of consideration itself. There is an alternative to Rawls’s nonteleological theory – the capabilities approach. The approached is defined succinctly by Pogge (2010: 17) (who, himself, is an opponent of the approach): ‘Capability theorists assert, while resourcists deny, that a public criterion of social justice should take account of the individual rates at which persons with diverse physical and mental constitutions can convert resources into valuable functionings.’ Pogge’s definition is not entirely accurate; there is still the calculability of utilitarianism lurking. There is more of a distributive imperative to a capabilities theory. Proponents of the capabilities approach include Sen and Nussbaum. Sen (2010) relates one way that information can be used. If people have differing abilities that enhance or limit their functioning in any aspect of society, then knowledge of the individual’s abilities is necessary to achieve distributive justice. In other words, no veil of ignorance (Rawls’s mechanism of measurement) will be able to produce a fair outcome. The practice of justice cannot rely on independent means when human existence is contingent.

Connecting information and education

Examination of the relationship of politics to education is not new. John Dewey not only wrote of politics and social elements; he explicitly mentioned information and its place in education. He (1916: 186) said that information is sometimes ‘treated as an end itself; and then the goal becomes to heap it up and display it when called for. This static, cold-storage ideal of knowledge is inimical to educative development’. The accumulation, for Dewey, is not the same as thinking. Elsewhere Dewey (2002 [1922]: 270) stated that if educational ideals were realized, ‘intelligence would be kept busy in studying all indications of power, all obstacles and perversions, all products of the past that throw light on present capacity’. Freire (2000) also spoke in strong terms about the possible repressive elements of educational practice. Perhaps of particular importance is his critique of the ‘banking’ process of a pedagogy that treats students as repositories for a determined content. Students, in this pedagogical process are not subjects, are not active agents in a critical apprehension of what learning can accomplish. More recently many scholars and commentators in education have sought to build upon the groundbreaking work of the likes of Dewey and Freire. They are too numerous to mention here, but one individual has had considerable influence through his thought and writings. Henry Giroux has been very vocal on the subject of politics and justice in education. In a recent work he (2011) argues that a tide of anti-intellectualism must be stemmed by enhancement of critical education and creation of all schooling as loci for examination of the public sphere.

Goals for learning, at all levels, have been debated for many years. Learning is more than the acquisition of a set of skills that have purely instrumental purposes (although that definition still has traction in some circles). This, of course, does not mean that abilities of computation, communication, and obtaining of some sets of data are not necessary, but learning transcends those skills. A watchword that is frequently used today is the need to develop critical thinking skills in students. Usually this means enabling students to sort through alternatives, evaluate merits and demerits of the possibilities, and to select wisely on the basis of intellectual, argumentative, logical, and/or empirical merit. In other words, a student should be able, eventually, to discern validity in arguments and accuracies in claims. Likewise, students should be able to reject invalid arguments and statements whose truth claims are flawed.

The approach that unites use of information and particular pedagogical techniques might be referred to as constructivism or problem solving (although there are distinctions between the two, and they are also not mutually exclusive). An extreme constructivist position is likely to place a heavy burden on students to create states of learning that achieve high levels of critical thinking, an ability that students may not yet have. For example, von Glasersfeld advocates what he calls ‘radical constructivism’. The ‘radical’ element is the denial of objective knowledge and the claim that knowing is a state of experiential organization. Von Glasersfeld (http://www.oikos.org/constructivism.htm) says:

Throughout the two thousand five hundred years of Western epistemology, the accepted view has been a realist view. According to it, the human knower can attain some knowledge of a really existing world and can use this knowledge to modify it. People tended to think of the world as governed by a God who would not let it go under. Then faith shifted from God to science and the world that science was mapping was called “Nature” and believed to be ultimately understandable and controllable. Yet, it was also believed to be so immense that mankind could do no significant harm to it. Today, one does not have to look far to see that this attitude has endangered the world we are actually experiencing. If the view is adopted that “knowledge” is the conceptual means to make sense of experience, rather than a “representation” of something that is supposed to lie beyond it, this shift of perspective brings with it an important corollary: the concepts and relations in terms of which I perceive and conceive the experiential world I live in are necessarily generated by ourselves. In this sense it is we who are responsible for the world we are experiencing. As I have reiterated many times, radical constructivism does not suggest that we can construct anything we like, but it does claim that within the constraints that limit our construction there is room for an infinity of alternatives. It therefore does not seem untimely to suggest a theory of knowing that draws attention to the knower’s responsibility for what the knower constructs.

A more moderate constructivist stance combines providing students with information and helping them create critical acumen. By means of that combination students can be prepared to solve problems. Moreover, the combination is more likely to bring about situations where students’ work can be evaluated more fairly. There a greater likelihood of what Lizzio et al. (2007: 197) call formational: ‘Informational justice … focuses on the degree to which people are provided with full and honest explanations or rationales as to why procedures were conducted or outcomes allocated in a particular fashion.’

It is necessary to reiterate features of information that was offered at the beginning. Information is not merely data devoid of meaning; it (in this context) does have intentional meaning and a veritistic character. Intentionality stems from the communicative properties that are attached to information. Social epistemology, which relies heavily on communicative practices, can be an antidote to the radical constructivism of von Glasersfeld. Goldman is a principal proponent of social epistemology and of sound existence of epistemic truth. He (http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/95_docs/goldman.html) writes,

The brand of epistemology I am advocating might be called veritistic epistemology because of its heavy emphasis on truth. There are many truths; although each of these is true at all times and places, it does not follow that each should be taught at all times and places. Ignoring our earlier qualifications about simplification and approximation, we may say that being true is a necessary condition for being taught but not a sufficient condition. That leaves open the possibility of teaching different truths at different times and places.

The act of informing students is not a sufficient part of education, but it is a necessary one. The distinction becomes clear when the veritistic element is incorporated fully into information education. The act of informing is one part of informational education. The totality of information necessitates the communication of meaning and making truth claims clear and explicit. At this point lessons learned from the application of cognitive load theory can be applied. The theory explicitly integrates the informing of students into the complex learning processes that result in long-term memory enhancement. For example, Kalyuga (2010: 50) writes, ‘Organized, schematic knowledge structures in long-term memory allow the chunking of many elements of information into a single higher-level element.’ Organized is aided when the informing itself is ordered, classified and categorized in ways that allow students to make connections among the various informational elements that form complex subjects. The tactic is also recognized by Sweller (2010: 34): ‘Schema construction, by indicating the form in which information is stored in long-term memory, provides us with a learning mechanism; therefore, learning includes the construction of schemas.’

There is an aspect of this communicative action that is vital to the outcomes of just educational institutions. The achievement of the goal of justice is challenged by a number of social structural and systemic barriers. The barriers have a set of complex characteristics, but the economic will be emphasized here. The nature of neo-classical economics (or post-Keynsian economic theory) focuses on institutions, or organizations, and systems rather than on individuals. Further (and this is not too broad a generalization), neo-classical economics attends closely to efficiency and productivity. There are particular measures that are employed in neo-classical economics, and Alperovitz (2008: 25) defines it clearly: ‘it is important to understand that that modern growth is commonly examined through what is known as a ‘production function,’ where what is produced (output) is viewed as a combination of many contributing inputs. . . . What [Robert] Solow found was that most productivity growth was due to a ‘shift’ in the production function’.

The differences in measures imply different conceptions of information and of education. The alternative to the narrow efficiency of neo-classical measurement expand the possibilities and the effectiveness that could be found in informational education. The alternatives allow for a focus on students and how they learn, perhaps with less (immediate) attention to performance on standardized tests. Students who are part of complex communicative acts are not simply recipients of data; they interact with teachers and with one another. Communicative action includes inherent development of understanding; articulation is as vital as reception to the action. As is evident, this is a weak form of constructivism, insofar as students are agents of the creation of states of understanding and the ability to express the understanding. It may be apparent that the concept of information used here (to emphasize) is distinct from most customary conceptions. Being an active meaningful and truth-seeking process, information is directly contributory to education in the root etymological sense of drawing out.

Towards informational education

The components of informational education remain to be unified into a cohesive model that will be workable in educational institutions. The fundamental elements are indivisible from structures of justice in a revised political economy. This is asking a lot of a model. First the grounding in information as it is defined here entails the development of meaningful communication and the analysis of truth claims. Semantics is integral to this way of informing, as is rhetoric that extends beyond persuasion. Predelli (2004), for example, stresses that reason must be a central component of semantics. Education tends to entail formal communication, so rules and norms tend to be components of the communicative process. That said, an element of informational education is explicitly sharing the semantic rules and norms with students so that they are able to participate most completely in exchanges. This is also a stringent requirement of teachers and, so, should be part of teacher education. Likewise, the component of rhetoric, as defined precisely by Booth (2004) is essential to informational education. Booth does not deny that persuasiveness is important, but it is not the most vital aspect of rhetoric. Rhetoric in the sense of inventio (the construction of sound and solid argument) is the aspect intended here. Persuasion can employ deception or misinforming, but that use of rhetoric violates the ethical standards that informational education is attempting to imbue into the entire teaching and learning process.

The deep meaning of information has been recognized and used by some commentators. Duff (2005: 67), for example, says, ‘progressive socioeconomic values such as equality and distributive justice, subject to a framework of political liberty, need to be built into the structure of information societies by means, partly, of social engineering’. ‘Social engineering’ carries some ideological baggage, but the values Duff speaks of inhere in informational education. Meadows and Blatchford (2009: 42) draw from John Dewey and claim, ‘Too often, information is propagated in ways that do not indicate that there may be another set of supposed facts or other views on the subject.’ In taking another cue from Dewey they say that effective informing can:

The observations point to the integrative essence of informational education.

The assistance that Meadows and Blatchford speak of also indicates that meaning cannot simply be given; it must be discovered. This much is recognized by Rousseau in Emile. The young person requires a governor, someone who will lead and guide the student: ‘I call the master of this science the governor rather than the preceptor because his task is less to instruct than to lead. He ought to give no precepts at all; he ought to make them be discovered’ (Rousseau, 1979: 52). This weak constructivism is precisely what is advocated for here. Students have to have an apparatus cultivated within them that can enable them to discern what others say in terms of some argumentative and semantic norms. The informational imperative is essential to the apparatus. By applying the apparatus, students are then able to distinguish differences. The suggestion here is that this model of education is a cognitive schema that can be applied to a variety of values. For illustrative purposes (not intended to exhaust the possible values that could be identified) the three values described by Brighthouse and Unterhalter (2020) will be used, not as models, but as evidence of discourse on values related to education. The existing political economy will not give up instrumental values – one of the values Brighthouse and Unterhalter mention – in the short term (and probably not even in the long term). This model, they say, enhances students’ abilities to perform effectively on tests. The reason for this claim rests with the feature of informational education that prepares students to comprehend normative components of academic subjects. The logic of mathematical and arithmetic laws, for example, can be communicated, not as individual and separate operations, but as systematic processes of reasoning.

The instrumental value is only one means of evaluating success in education, although the present political economy tends to stop here. Brighthouse and Unterhalter (2010) also point to a positional value, one that can assist some with exceptional or unique capabilities to gain slots in the most prestigious colleges and universities. This is a problematic value, since some of its determinants are beyond students’ control. The overall quality (actual or perceived) of a secondary school may affect admission decisions. Again, the existing political economy favors accidents of birth; young people born to more affluent families obtain advantages and privileges that are not of their own making. As Adler (2010) demonstrates clearly with comprehensive data, education, while funded nominally by the public, is effectively a private good. Property taxation in wealthy areas results in higher funding levels than in poorer areas. Meadows and Blatchford (2009) interpret the inequality by noting data observed by Kozol (2005: 39): ‘A Chicago suburb with only 8% low-income students receives $17,291 per pupil, while Chicago, with 85% low-income students, receives $8,482 per pupil.’ The disparity will have indubitable ramifications for social justice. A libertarian might see the inequity as nothing more than the natural distribution of worth. Distributive justice, on the other, is completely absent, to the detriment of many students who are unable to do anything to alter the economics they are born into.

Brighthouse and Unterhalter’s (2010: 209) third value is the intrinsic quality that effective education can provide: ‘The educated person might have a more rewarding and complex mental life than she had before being educated, regardless of whether education helps her gain or keep employment.’ It is difficult to imagine anyone who would dispute this value on its face. The ability to understand, to examine, and to discern is valuable to the human condition. There is a further benefit that is not instrumental or positional. The intrinsic value is the keystone to the attainment of autonomous identity. ‘Autonomous’ does not mean exclusion separation from groups, institutions, or other individuals. A person’s ability for self-reflection and for self-knowledge is essential. As Thompson (2007: 13) says, in his examination of biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of the mind, ‘living beings are autonomous agents that actively generate and maintain themselves, and thereby also enact or bring forth their own cognitive domains’. It is primarily around this purpose that the informational education model is constructed. The model has features that Duff (2005) attaches to the politically and ideologically loaded term ‘social engineering’. If that term is replaced with informational education, his (2005: 70) claim makes sense: ‘It must be readily admitted that [informational education] has an inherent teleological logic, since it is interested in the shaping of the long-term future, a set of social goods … It must be anchored in the absolute ethics that underpin the dignity of the individual.’ Duff’s ideal can only be achieved if the political economy of neo-classical efficiency is replaced, though. The dignity of the individual is not monetary and it cannot rely on anything but distributive justice. Psychological research over the past several decades has shown clearly that the absence of material subsistence obliterates the possibility for fulfillment. Intrinsic value is a noble ideal, but it is difficult to achieve: ‘when one’s belly is empty, one’s only problem is an empty belly’ (Orwell, 1968: 103).

Conclusion

Political economy, as a shaper of educational systems, has been broached; it deserves a lot more attention as a means to conclude discussion of the informational education model. First, there are political and economic aspects of this model that are not unique. The communicative complexities of informational information suggest that classes should be rather small. There are resource implications to limiting class size, and many public school districts are currently suffering from grossly insufficient resources. The resource limitations, of course, include technology, textbooks and libraries. Primarily, though, the limitations are most sorely felt when it comes to human resources. There is, at this time, a sweeping social (principally Western) dilemma that is affecting the allocation of public resources:

Many people are more concerned with public security than with giving every child the chance to construct his or her own identity. If we cannot resolve that problem, schools will become factors that produce greater inequality because they refuse to take into account the psychological, social and particularly cultural particularity of every individual, and that refusal will harm the weakest and the most oppressed. (Touraine, 2009: 8–9).

Touraine’s observation is quite specific, but there are some general features of the political economy that must be altered for the informational education model to work. There is (and has been for a century) a prevailing conception of efficiency that has driven out just about all other ideas and practices. The decisions at high levels about such factors as wages and taxes have followed Pareto’s ideological calculations on efficiency in which the rich are favored and the poor are disadvantaged. In other words, in a Pareto-based structure redistribution is severely limited, first by limited logical reasoning and then by policy that relies entirely on that kind of reasoning. The hypothesis may be that concentration of wealth might lead to greater spending and job creation, but empirical evidence (see Adler, 2010) strongly indicates an opposite conclusion. Adler (2010: 62) relates one example: ‘in New York City. . . this meant that in the years 2001–6 the number of people receiving public assistance decreased by 103,000 while the number of poor individuals increased by 60,000’. According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty, in 2008 19.0 percent of people in the USA under age 18 lived in poverty (http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq6.htm). In many urban school districts teacher layoffs were threatened in 2010. Mayor Michael Bloomberg decided not to lay off more than 4000 teachers and other school personnel if they agreed to no pay raises for two years (http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/155617). Achieving the goals of informational education, or any form of education based on distributive justice, appears to be an ideal, and Touraine’s observation still obtains.

As has been shown above, the demands of informational education, including the application of cognitive load theory, are high. Learning complex tasks or subjects requires a lot from students, including managing levels and amounts of information that should be categorized effectively so that cognitive processes do not deteriorate. There are individual differences among students when it comes to information absorption, categorization, and schema creation; effective educational institutions must be sensitive to the varying needs of individuals. Necessarily, understanding of the complex cognitive elements also makes demands on teacher education at all levels, as well as on teaching students of all ages and abilities. The demands emphasize the need for just institutions and assessments that are best fitted to the genuine challenges that face education. The present climate of the political economy is not suited to meeting the challenges, so the aspects of economics and justice presented here are ineluctably connected to educational success (that is, institutional, as well as individual, success).

The foregoing has been an attempt to provide an alternative to many conceptions of education as they exist now. The work that remains to be done includes three essential matters: (1) the development of curricula at all levels that put these ideas to work; (2) the pedagogical requirements, including revisions to teacher education programs, that are necessary for success in classrooms; and (3) a detailed examination of the economy as it is and as it would need to be revised for this vision to be realized. This is an extensive agenda that is open to all researchers.