There’s a bunch here… so I’m not sure I entirely understand your position. I’ll clarify my point and see if that firms up your opposition or moves the discussion forward any.

The content of a course, that is the information that is decided on as part of a course, is a print concept. The idea of deciding, ahead of time, what information should be present during a planned educational activity, is tied to the technology of print. Before print, there was no way to ensure this level of replicability. An ‘education’ was something that happened in discussion, in observation, in story – an orality. Print (scaled up from writing, which did similar things for religion) allowed for the standardization that makes the transition from orality to what you seem to be calling ‘information’. This puts the power of deciding what is real/useful/appropriate/necessary/better information in the hands of a small number of people. It also can decentralize the very critical literacy of sifting through story to find meaning. As we no longer have to prepare for a course by buying stacks of paper months ahead of time, we can include a level of flexibility in our classrooms that was not possible before. The idea of content as ‘what a thing does contain’ restricts this flexibility. My claim is that we can’t even imagine a general ‘what it does contain’ before print.

In your follow up comment you’ve suggested that I’ve confused ‘content’ with ‘doctrine’. I have definitely identified one with the other, though not in confusion. The difference between content and doctrine, in my thinking, is that doctrine is generally attached to a unifying vision (mostly religious though not necessarily) whereas in this case, content becomes doctrinal in millions of classrooms, through the random (sometimes purposeful, sometimes not) exercise of power at the publisher/teacher/whatever level. In order to allow for a classroom where students are truly developing ‘post industrial’ literacies, we need to allow them to take back some of that power. In order to do that, I’m thinking, we need to deconstruct the concept of ‘content’ to see how we got there.