Education as Foundational Civic Infrastructure. Conference Paper Extract (First Annual Educational Research Summit, Dublin, 2025)

Abstract (Theoretical Advancement): This extract addresses the gap between established 20th-century passive schooling and the cognitive demands of 21st-century collective intelligence. Grounded in two decades of practitioner observation as a tertiary-level educator, it tracks the transition from identified cognitive deficits in incoming first-year school leavers to the transversal skills required in an AI-augmented working context. These localised practitioner observations align with macro-skills deficits identified in international state and industry policy reports. The extract proposes the Volkbildung Imperative: a policy demand for a structured collaborative educational laboratory to institutionalise a new, future-proof citizen profile. At the policy level, it addresses Civic Capacity Infrastructure: the educational root condition of DCI. It also provides the cognitive foundation for the MetaCognition speculative wireframe (2025).