Christopher Morales’ 9/26/2026 post, “AI Has Made an Old Education Problem Harder to Ignore,” (written in Minding the Campus, a project of the National Association of Scholars) has touched a nerve with many:
Students can now generate essays, summaries and discussion posts in seconds. The danger is real, but the underlying weakness is older. AI did not create the gap between completing work and mastering knowledge. It made that gap much harder to ignore.
Morales reveals the staggering statistics on the prevalence of remedial courses offered to first-year undergraduates in colleges and universities:
The evidence supports academic under-preparedness was widespread, visible and costly long before AI could write a polished paragraph.
I would suggest that the problem is even more widespread and pernicious and stretches beyond the confines of academia. It is the tension between Competence and Capability in most walks of life, including my own, medicine and healthcare.
To understand the roots of this present-day dynamic, we need to go back a bit…quite a bit…and understand the significant social, political, and economic upheavals in Great Britain in the late 1970s:
- Economic stagflation was stifling, with inflation hitting a high of 25%.
- Rapid decline in traditional manufacturing and industrial sectors.
- Widespread strikes and the Winter of Discontent.
- Economic frustration and generational friction.
- Increasing violence in Northern Ireland and inability, or lack of interest, of the political parties in addressing the problem.
- Breakdown in prior political consensus.
At the time, Great Britain was facing serious societal breakdown in a number of areas. Brian Grant explained how a committed group of diverse individuals spontaneously formed around a belief that imbalance in the core activities of education and training fueled much of the socioeconomic disruption in society.
The watchword of the proposed reforms to deal with this disruption was capability. This group’s actions culminated in newspaper declarations taken out in the Times and the Guardian and became known as The Capability Manifesto. This concept had 4 main pillars of change, linked to the following verbs:
- To do: move from passive memorization of facts for a test to the successful execution of real projects.
- To make: value craftsmanship, engineering, and art as well as pure academic knowledge.
- To organize: value teamwork and leadership. The practical value of this was later emphasized in such works as Tribal Leadership by David Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright.
- To adapt: understand that problem-solving often has multiple answers and methods of inquiry, depending upon the circumstances.
It is interesting that these concepts (such as the importance of starting point and nonlinear system dynamics) echo those of the nascent Complexity Science being founded at about the same time at The Santa Fe Institute and described in an extremely readable fashion by M. Mitchell Waldrop. The emphasis of verbs rather than nouns in the successful execution of projects is similar to the “Action Learning” concept of Complexity Science described by Stewart Hase and Chris Kenyon.
