Schools tend to position learning, growth, and reflection as unambiguously good. When learners are encouraged to think more critically, develop themselves, become more conscious of their actions, and adapt to complexity, this is taken as evidence of progress. Schools speak of structural and programmatic cultures that develop young people into global citizens. Systems that promote these qualities are elevated and deemed healthy.
These assumptions are seldom questioned. On the contrary, they are reinforced every time someone invokes a rapidly changing world or the need to move beyond industrial models of education. One hears stories of students pitching products, raising awareness about issues that matter to them, or mapping systems like food production.
Through these experiences, learning happens, creativity is visible, and growth is noticeable. Learners develop skills and confidence, become more adaptable and reflective. These stories celebrate agency and they carry seeds of hope.
Yet there is one thing that doesn’t change.
The system may hang a sign that says “No Longer Industrial,” but once inside, the same priorities hold, the same sorting mechanisms exist, and the same grammar of learning reigns, even if the language has changed.
Learning does happen, but within specific constraints that preserve the system. Agency is elevated while suffocatedwithin the margins of what the system decides is valuable. When educational, social, and cultural outcomes are pre-determined, learning circulates as a specific currency rather than a force of reorganization.
This pattern has a name.
Metabolic capture describes how systems persist by drawing on people’s capacity to learn, adapt, and grow, while structurally preventing those same capacities from reorganizing the system itself.
This does not suggest the hidden hand of a cabal. Metabolic capture names a self-maintaining pattern: institutions endure by channeling participant adaptation in ways that keep their underlying structure intact.
In metabolically captured systems, adaptation is not suppressed; it is required. Nor are reflection, deeper thinking, voice, or democratic rituals. Participants are expected to work on themselves continuously, and institutions are designed to encourage growth, so long as that growth fits within what the system can absorb without being reconfigured.
Creativity is encouraged if it fits the rubric. Student government can organize the prom but not rewrite school policy. Participation is welcomed where it is legible. Choice is allowed within a narrow field. Authority is given only insofar as it can be re-taken—and therefore is never really given.
It’s not that the system doesn’t change; systems are always in motion. It’s that the process of change stabilizes the configurations of power that underpin the system. This is how the system maintains itself.
When variability reinforces hierarchy, when tensions are released without redistribution, and when problems trigger responses at the surface rather than at the level of structure, metabolic capture is at work.
Young people grow more capable, more collaborative, more articulate. The system never has to change what counts, who decides, or where authority is held. Power configurations remain untouched, or rather, they adapt to changing conditions to remain intact. In other words, they are resilient.
This is what living systems do. Living systems should not be romanticized. Some can be parasitic. Some can be biopathic.
Patterns that allow participant adaptation only below a certain threshold tend to endure. Patterns that allow adaptation to reorganize their defining constraints tend to dissolve or transform beyond recognition. No insidious intention required. Stories of success are enough, as they signal what is acceptable and what is not.
Think behavior policies, expectations, mark bands, what constitutes respect.
What makes metabolic capture difficult to recognize is that nothing appears overtly wrong. On the contrary, the promise of human flourishing is celebrated. There is no overt repression or visible extraction. All signs point to freedom within boundaries.
Those boundaries are enforced through legibility: through what can be assessed, recognized, certified, or named as learning. They delimit what is allowed to matter.
Over time, students learn to read the new signposts, which point in the same direction as the ones they replaced. They grow along paths that feel safe. Capacities that do not fit are not attacked; they are rendered irrelevant, folded into “holistic learning,” but rarely its core.
Metabolic capture operates through doxa: what is taken for granted, defining in advance what learning is, what growth looks like, which choices are sensible, and who holds authority through knowledge. These definitions are reproduced through everyday practice: through curriculum, assessment, policy, language, and decision rights. They do not need to be defended. They are enacted. The system reproduces itself through this enactment.
Sincerity and positive intentions do not interrupt this pattern. The system captures them, metabolizes them, and converts them into stability.
Metabolic capture is a provocation, not an accusation or a theory of everything.
A simple diagnostic follows. Don’t ask whether learning is happening, or whether young people are growing.
Ask instead: What forms of learning must never be allowed to have consequences here?
That boundary is the system and where metabolic capture takes place.
Coconut Thinking 