Education Teaches Capacity, Not Capability: Why Bureaucracy Produces Dependent Workers and Commicracy Produces Freelancers
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
Modern society tells a reassuring story about education. We are taught that schooling and university exist to prepare individuals for work; that certificates represent readiness; and that academic achievement signals competence.
Yet everyday economic reality contradicts this narrative at every level. Across industries, employers quietly admit what education systems refuse to confront: formal education does not produce work-ready individuals. It produces capacity—theoretical understanding—while real capability is acquired only through work practice.
This unresolved gap between capacity and capability is not accidental. It is a structural feature of bureaucratic society. Bureaucracy depends on education systems that teach theory while outsourcing practical formation to employers. The result is a workforce trained to comply, dependent on institutional validation, and incapable of operating independently. Commicracy, by contrast, abolishes this dependency by redesigning education and certification around both capacity and capability from the outset—thereby creating freelancers rather than subordinates.
1. Capacity versus Capability: The Foundational Distinction
Capacity refers to cognitive readiness: the ability to understand concepts, follow instructions, and demonstrate theoretical knowledge under examination conditions. Schools and universities excel at this. They teach frameworks, models, abstract reasoning, and symbolic representation.
Capability, however, is something entirely different. Capability is the proven ability to do—to execute tasks, respond to real-world variables, manage unpredictability, and deliver outcomes under actual working conditions. Capability cannot be inferred from grades. It must be observed in lived performance.
Education systems overwhelmingly prioritise capacity because capacity is easy to standardise, assess, and bureaucratically certify. Capability is messy, contextual, embodied, and resistant to desk-based evaluation. As a result, most people leave education with proof of learning but without proof of competence.
2. Why Employers Are Forced to Retrain Everyone
The behaviour of employers exposes the fiction of academic sufficiency. Almost universally, organisations provide:
- Induction training.
- Starter programmes.
- Probationary periods.
- Shadowing and mentorship.
- Continuous professional development.
This occurs regardless of whether the employee holds a diploma, degree, or advanced qualification. The implicit admission is unavoidable: certification does not equal capability.
Employers routinely spend the first three months up to one year assessing whether a new hire can actually perform the work they were supposedly educated to do. This assessment or probationary period is not formalised as education, yet it is the most decisive learning phase of a person’s working life.
A probationary period is a trial phase at the start of a new job, usually 3 to 12 months,, allowing the employer to assess the employee’s fit, skills, and performance, and the employee to evaluate the role and company culture before permanent employment is confirmed, often with easier termination and shorter notice periods for both parties. It’s a mutual evaluation to ensure suitability, with specific terms detailed in the employment contract, and while statutory rights usually apply, some benefits might be withheld until passed
In bureaucratic society, this phase is hidden and unacknowledged. It is treated as an internal organisational cost rather than as evidence of systemic failure of formal educational system.
3. Bureaucratic Work-Ethics: Producing Dependent Employees
Bureaucratic work-ethics accepts this division as normal. Formal education provides capacity; employers test or impart capability. This separation produces a specific type of worker: the dependent employee.
Because capability is validated only within employment:
- Workers become reliant on employers to confirm their worth.
- Skills are context-locked within organisations.
- Labour mobility is restricted by references rather than demonstrable output.
- Freelancing becomes inaccessible to most workers.
The bureaucratic worker is trained to believe:
- “I am qualified, but not authorised to act independently”.
- “I need managerial oversight to validate my competence”.
- “My skills belong to the organisation, not to me”.
This dependence is not incidental—it is functional. Bureaucracy requires hierarchies of supervision, credential gatekeeping, and managerial control. A workforce capable of autonomous operation would undermine the very justification for bureaucratic authority.
4. Education as an Entry Filter, Not Proof of Ability
In practice, academic merit functions merely as an entry filter. It narrows the applicant pool, signals baseline literacy or discipline, and satisfies institutional expectations. But it does not prove job-specific capability.
This creates a paradox:
- Education claims to prepare individuals for work.
- Employers assume it does not.
- Workers suffer the consequences of this contradiction.
Graduates enter the labour market with credentials but without confidence, autonomy, or independent economic viability. Their survival depends on being absorbed into organisational structures that promise training in exchange for obedience and blind loyalty.
Academic institutions themselves frequently alter grade cut-offs or “minimum qualifying marks” to accommodate fluctuating numbers of applicants, revealing the inherently subjective and contingent nature of merit lists. Since these thresholds are shaped by vacancy availability rather than objective competency evaluation, academic merit becomes a variable indicator rather than a universal measure of human capability.
Thus, academic merit primarily advances a person’s subjective ability—a learned skill-set that may or may not correspond to inner capability. In contrast, capability represents a person’s actual, objective ability to perform a specified task. While subjective ability is abstract and can be taught cognitively, objective ability is concrete and manifest in lived performance.
While both can be supported by training, but capability is the more authoritative expression of human potential because it reveals whether a person can translate knowledge into practice. A person may possess the abstract capacity to understand a concept but lack the innate capability to execute it effectively in practice within a working environment.
5. Commicratic Work-Ethics: Gauging Capacity and Capability Together
Commicracy resolves this contradiction by redesigning the relationship between education, certification, and labour. In a commicratic system, education is not complete unless capability has been demonstrated.
This is achieved by:
- Embedding apprenticeship and hands-on execution within certification.
- Evaluating performance, not just comprehension.
- Issuing role-specific commissioning certificates.
- Treating learners as freelancers in formation, not future employees.
Under commicracy, an individual does not graduate as “qualified but untested.” They graduate as commission-ready.
This paradigm shifts the burden of proof from the employer to the graduate, transforming the educational certification into a functional portfolio of realised value. Because the educational journey is integrated with real-world production cycles, the lack of an external job offer does not equate to a lack of utility or a “gap” in a resume; rather, it provides the graduate with the operational blueprint, the technical infrastructure, and the verified track record necessary to pivot instantly into self-employment.
They possess not just the theoretical knowledge of how a business operates, but the refined skills to execute commissions independently, effectively turning their final academic projects into a foundational client base for a self-sustaining startup.
6. From Certification to Freelancing, Not Employment Dependency
The defining feature of commicratic education is that it produces workers who can immediately operate independently. Certification affirms both:
- The capacity to understand the work.
- The capability to perform it under real conditions.
As a result:
- Workers enter the economy as freelancers, not subordinates.
- Employers become contractors rather than masters.
- Supervision becomes advisory, guidance or mentor, not managerial.
- Labour becomes mobile, dignified, and self-owned.
This shifts economic power away from institutions and back to individuals without descending into chaos. Order is maintained through commissioning rules, not hierarchical control.
7. Apprenticeship Reclaimed as the Core of Learning
Historically, societies understood this. Apprenticeship preceded certification. Learning was inseparable from doing. Modern bureaucracy inverted this order, elevating theory over practice because theory is easier to administrate.
Commicracy restores apprenticeship—not as a marginal alternative, but as the backbone of education. Every field becomes learnable through guided execution. Theory supports practice; it no longer replaces it.
Conclusion: Capability Is the True Measure of Education
The crisis of modern labour is not a skills gap—it is a capability gap deliberately maintained by bureaucratic design. Education systems teach people to know, not to do. Bureaucratic work-ethics then exploits this gap to produce dependency.
Commicracy closes the gap at its source. By aligning education with real capability from the outset, it abolishes artificial hierarchy, restores worker autonomy, and transforms labour into a domain of equal worth rather than controlled obedience or blind loyalty.
Education, under commicracy, finally fulfills its promise—not as a gateway to subordination, but as the foundation of independent economic life.
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