To increase another person’s knowledge or competence, it is necessary to attract attention to the information and for attentive persons to find the information credible. What attributes of information induce an audience to respond in these ways? To answer this question, I offer a framework called the politics of competence. This framework offers a way to organize and use information about psychological and contextual factors that affect how prospective learners think about what information is worth learning. The politics of competence has four components: value diversity, issue complexity, political roles, and learning costs. Individually and collectively, these four components affect what educational strategies are feasible, unfeasible, successful, and unsuccessful. They have this power because they produce divergent views of what strategies, knowledge, and competence are beneficial. They lead people to reach different conclusions about educational strategy questions such as “What information should educators convey?” and “Who should know what?” Educators can benefit from understanding the politics of competence. To see how, consider that a necessary condition for an educational endeavor to increase knowledge or competence is that prospective learners choose to participate. Some educators also need people to support their educational endeavors with money or labor. To draw the needed participation, potential learners, partners, and supporters must perceive that the endeavor will produce sufficiently positive net benefits. That is, all who are asked to sacrifice something of value as a means of advancing an educational endeavor must see the newly created knowledge or competence as providing benefits that are large when compared to the personal costs of achieving these goals. If sufficiently few people perceive an educational venture in this way, they will not participate. When success depends on producing outcomes that offer substantial net benefits from the perspective of essential participants, educators can benefit from understanding how the politics of competence affects the kind of information that different people find valuable. Designing educational endeavors that can deliver such benefits can be difficult. People who have gone a lifetime without knowing much about a particular issue may wonder why they need to learn about it now.
Children’s and Youths’ Perspectives on Value Diversity in Education
