The world is alive and refuses mastery.

Mastery- and competency-based assessment are the same old sorting and ranking system just in sheep’s clothing.

Both start from the same ontological delusion: that something can be mastered, that we stand apart from knowledge, that learning is a discrete event that can be demonstrated once and then carried across every context. It’s the fantasy of decontextualization, of a self walking around with mastery and knowledge in their pocket as if both were transferable items rather than situated participation.

Mastery replaces letters with colored boxes, believing that once you’ve shown something once, you can do it anywhere. It’s the same industrial logic with new paint. It dehumanizes; even deadens learning by pretending context doesn’t matter, that everything is replicable.

And yet, in the age of cyborgs, when none of us can do anything without digital extensions, when we’re entangled in billions of gigabytes and millions of other minds, it’s absurd that we still cling to individualized assessment. We are enmeshed (some would say networked) beings, and still, we measure as if we were isolated, as if this was relevant.

We have a chance to move beyond individual demonstration altogether. Because it’s not only impossible to measure individual knowledge, it always was. It’s not about outcome or process, two sides to the same industrial coin.

The question now is not what you know, but what your knowing does. How does your learning affect community (human and other-than-human)? How does it participate in the living systems around you?

The fundamentals—reading, writing, counting—are not ends. They’re potential energy. What matters is how they become kinetic: how they’re applied, toward what, and for whom.

You can measure this differently (quantitatively, qualitatively, post-qualitatively) through the testimonies of those whose lives you’ve affected, including the more-than-human: the river, the soil, the worms, the fireflies. Because what matters is not mastery, but relation. Not what you’ve conquered, but what you’ve helped thrive. How your participation matters to and with others.

Mastery perpetuates the ontology of separation, the fantasy that we can dominate humans, animals, and living systems as if they were outside us. It standardizes experience, ticking boxes that pretend a single act can be legible and relevant anywhere. The past is lost and there is no reverence for the uniqueness of every moment. It fools us into thinking we’ve progressed while keeping us trapped in the same capitalist logic of sorting and ranking for employability.

It’s light, it’s deceptive, and it’s still the factory, just repainted in pretty colors.

The world is alive and refuses mastery.