If capital incentivises optimisation and governance stabilises it, education normalises it.
Education is where individuals first encounter structured evaluation. It is where feedback loops become routine. It is where measurable performance becomes tied to approval, advancement, and identity.
When optimisation logic dominates education, it does not merely shape institutions.
It shapes people.
1. From Learning to Measurement
Education, in principle, exists to cultivate:
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Curiosity
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Understanding
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Intellectual growth
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Moral reasoning
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Civic capacity
These aims are complex and difficult to measure directly.
To coordinate at scale, education systems rely on proxies:
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Standardised tests
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Grades
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Rankings
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Performance benchmarks
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Credential thresholds
These tools are not inherently distortive. They allow comparability and accountability.
But as we have seen, once measurable indicators determine funding, advancement, and institutional standing, they acquire structural primacy.
The metric begins to reorganise the purpose.
2. Teaching to the Measure
When schools, teachers, and students are evaluated through performance indicators, behaviour adapts predictably.
Students quickly perceive the logic.
They learn:
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What counts.
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What earns approval.
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What advances them.
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What risks penalty.
The classroom becomes an optimisation environment.
3. The Internalisation of Evaluation
The deeper transformation is psychological.
Repeated exposure to metric-based evaluation conditions students to orient toward performance.
The implicit question becomes constant:
What does the evaluator want?
Over time, this question becomes automatic.
Success becomes alignment.
Understanding becomes secondary to demonstration.
4. The “Teacher’s Pet” Dynamic at Scale
This dynamic is not caricatured indoctrination. It is subtler.
In metric-driven environments, behavioural compliance is rewarded.
Students who:
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Align visibly with institutional norms
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Use approved language
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Demonstrate correct positioning
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Perform expected moral reasoning
are often recognised as exemplary.
This produces a scaled version of what might once have been called “teacher’s pet” behaviour — not sycophancy, but optimisation for approval.
The pattern extends beyond academic content.
If moral and civic education are also evaluated through visible alignment, then ethical development risks becoming performance.
Students learn not only how to answer correctly, but how to signal correctness.
5. Moral Performance and Rigidity
When moral alignment is measured socially — through approval, reputation, or institutional affirmation — the optimisation dynamic intensifies.
In such environments, social justice can shift subtly from enabling justice to enforcing alignment with approved justice signals.
Morality becomes something to demonstrate visibly.
Rigid enforcement emerges not necessarily from cruelty, but from optimisation pressure.
If approval depends on alignment, individuals will align.
And once internalised, they will enforce.
6. Education as Behavioural Conditioning
Over years of schooling, students internalise:
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Continuous evaluation
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Performance optimisation
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Alignment with authority
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Aversion to evaluative risk
This conditioning does not produce uniform outcomes. Many resist, critique, or transcend it.
But structurally, education systems that prioritise metrics train individuals to operate comfortably within optimisation environments.
They graduate not merely with knowledge.
They graduate fluent in performance.
7. From Classroom to Society
The habits formed in education migrate outward.
The question “What does the evaluator want?” becomes internalised as a permanent background process.
Life begins to feel like a continuous assessment.
The external teacher is replaced by:
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The employer
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The audience
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The algorithm
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The peer network
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The internalised evaluator
Optimisation is no longer institutional only.
It is habitual.
8. The Cost of Continuous Performance
Performance is not inherently negative. Skill demonstration and accountability are valuable.
The issue arises when performance displaces engagement.
When the focus is on appearing correct rather than grappling with complexity.
When visible alignment replaces reflective development.
When fear of evaluative penalty narrows moral imagination.
In such environments, individuals may become highly competent performers — yet increasingly cautious thinkers.
Closing Reflection
Education in the age of optimisation does not necessarily indoctrinate.
It calibrates.
Over time, this produces a society fluent in performance.
Does this register?Does this align?Does this earn approval?
In the next post, we examine how this conditioning expands beyond institutions into public moral life itself.
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