Friedman (2025) argues that humanity has entered the Polycene, an epoch defined not by any single crisis but by the sheer unpredictability of simultaneous, accelerating change. If this is the world our students will inhabit, then higher education has a non-negotiable obligation: to design learning experiences that prepare students to adapt, not merely to reproduce what they have been taught.

This provocation makes a deliberately uncomfortable claim: we cannot credibly assert that students understand a concept or practice unless we have evidence that they can apply it in more than one novel context. If we only ever assess learners in the tidy, predictable settings in which they were taught, we are not measuring understanding; we are measuring rehearsal. To assess students' capacity to perform coherently across varying contexts, we must present contexts that demand responsiveness. Varying context is not adding noise; it is creating the conditions under which the signal of adaptive expertise can emerge.

Drawing on Kapur's (2025) Productive Failure research and Juarrero's (2023) account of context-dependent constraints, I argue that uncertainty is not a risk to be managed out of our curricula; it is an architectural constraint to be designed in. In the Polycene, adaptation is the highest measure of intelligence.