I want to make something clear from the outset: I am a capitalist; but before being a capitalist, I am a liberal, and freedom is priceless, because it is priceless. Having clarified this point, it should be noted that global corporations have understood that they don’t need bullets to tame bodies or prisons to lock up ideas. All they need to do is manage education. Make it “flexible,” “competitive,” “efficient.” In other words: mold it so it doesn’t think. “They Want Us to Be Dumber,” the book by Pilar Carrera Santafé and Eduardo Luque Guerrero, isn’t just a provocative title: it’s a surgical x-ray of this global project that has turned schools into business training grounds and students into obedient clients of their own ignorance.
Because they no longer teach how to think, they teach how to perform. Citizens are no longer trained, they are trained as employees. In the name of the “knowledge society,” a system is imposed where real knowledge is stigmatized, and in its place a culture of academic superficiality flourishes: competitions, rubrics, standards, rankings, tests. Everything measured, everything quantified, everything standardized. Everything perfectly stupid.
Who designed this mindless school?
The authors don’t point to ghosts. They name the architects: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization. The same people who dictate economic prescriptions to ruined countries today design school curricula under a premise disguised as progress: adapting education to the needs of the labor market.
Who defines these “needs”? And why should they be above the human, cultural, ethical, or even spiritual needs of people?
The answer is simple and obscene: because the goal is no longer to educate. It’s to program. It’s about creating a productive, adaptable, rootless, and memoryless subject who questions nothing and consumes everything. A malleable subject who knows how to use tools but doesn’t understand their origin or purpose. Someone who knows how to “Google” but never reads an entire book. Or worse: who doesn’t know why they should.
Educational Newspeak: Competencies, Entrepreneurship, and Other Forms of Colonization
Carrera and Luque denounce what many teachers already experience firsthand, but few dare to name: the language of the new education is an oxymoron. They talk to us about “learning to learn” as if we could reason without content. They sell us “school entrepreneurship” as if children had to design startups before learning history. And worse: they impose “competencies” on us as if thinking were a mechanical skill, and not a cultural, ethical, and conflictual process.
School has been emptied of meaning. Philosophy, literature, history, and art have been sidelined due to their presumed “uselessness.” They are useless for employment. Of course. They serve something much more dangerous: understanding the world.
A “knowledge society” without knowledge
The book makes it clear: contemporary education is not in crisis. It is being dismantled with surgical precision. And what is being built in its place is not a more informed society, but a more controllable one. A “knowledge society” without real knowledge, based on data management, not on understanding it. Because understanding requires time, depth, and conflict. Three things that neoliberal logic abhors.
Education is no longer teaching. It’s training. And the best student is the one who doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t doubt, doesn’t bother. In other words, the one who doesn’t think.
Proposal: Return to the Essentials
Far from falling into apocalyptic lament, “They Want Us to Be More Fools” is also a proposal. The authors advocate recovering the centrality of knowledge, depth of thought, intergenerational dialogue, rigorous reading, and ethical reflection. Returning to a school that teaches what matters, even if it cannot be measured.
Because—and Socrates, Freire, and Gramsci already knew this—an education that doesn’t inconvenience does not transform. A school that doesn’t ask questions is a supermarket of prefabricated answers. And a society without questions is the paradise of authoritarianism.
There is no greater success of the system than making its victims defend their chains. And in this century, the most polished chain is the school. They want us to be more stupid, yes. But they also want us to be quiet, compliant, technical, and adaptable. They want us useful, but not lucid. Employable, but not thoughtful.
Carrera and Luque invite us to rebel. To read again, to disturb, to teach with meaning and not with format. To educate not for the market, but for life. Because as Simone Weil said: “Intelligence cannot be forced: it can only be awakened.”
And that awakening—painful, slow, irreverent—is perhaps the only hope we have left.
Intelligence is not profitable. Critical thinking doesn’t pay dividends. And in a world designed to produce consumers rather than citizens, education becomes a functional factory of ignorance. This is the provocative—and painfully accurate—thesis of Pilar Carrera Santafé and Eduardo Luque Guerrero’s book, “They Want Us More Fools,” a work that dissects with a scalpel the transformation of the educational system into a mechanism of neoliberal domestication.
The text, essayistic in tone but armed with rigorous research tools, denounces what many of us already suspect but few dare to say out loud: the current European educational system, and by extension the global model that imitates it, has been colonized by economic interests that see school not as a space for emancipation, but as a source of docile and malleable labor.
In the name of “modernization” and “efficiency,” education has been dismantled as a collective construction of knowledge and replaced by a system based on competencies, rankings, and standards. In other words, an Excel pedagogy. Subjects that are not useful to the market are marginalized or eliminated, and in their place is imposed a technical literacy that measures what can be quantified, even if it is worthless in human terms.
“The obsession with evaluating and measuring everything has made us lose the sense of why we teach,” write Carrera and Luque. And they are right: in this logic, deep knowledge, humanistic culture, philosophical reflection, and art become academic remnants, dispensable in the new pedagogical order. The important thing now is to prepare students to be “employable.” Or, to put it in good Spanish: submissive, interchangeable, and replaceable.
The World Bank as the New University Rector
The book documents how organizations such as the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization have had a decisive influence on the educational plans of numerous countries. Not because they care about education, but because they need to train subjects who are functional to the global economic model.
And there’s no room for conspiracy theories here: the official documents of these entities speak of “preparing young people for the challenges of the labor market” or “adapting educational plans to the needs of economic growth.” What they don’t say, but the book reveals, is that these “challenges” involve stripping students of any intellectual tools that might question the system.
In this context, the classroom is no longer a place of symbolic resistance or the cultivation of free thought. It is an assembly line that produces beings educated not to think. As the authors aptly title: a “knowledge society… without knowledge.”
Nostalgia for the Lost Classroom
But “They Want Us to Be More Fools” is not a nostalgic lament. It is a manifesto. It proposes a recovery—not a regression—of the fundamental values of education: critical thinking, deep understanding, meaningful learning, dialogue, doubt, rigorous reading, ethical reflection. In short, everything a truly free society needs to survive the noise of propaganda.
Because the problem isn’t that students don’t know how to program in Python or that they can’t pass a PISA-type exam. The problem is that they can’t—nor are they allowed to—ask themselves why they program, for whom, and at what cost. Technical training without critical reflection isn’t progress: it’s high-end domestication.
An Uncomfortable Warning
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the book isn’t its diagnosis, but its induced silence in the mainstream media and educational institutions. Why doesn’t anyone talk about this? Why is the competency-based model imposed with the force of a dogma? Why is a student who memorizes formulas without context worth more than one who asks too many questions?
Carrera and Luque offer us an answer as brutal as it is precise: because they want us to be dumber. And stupid, in this case, doesn’t mean ignorant, but obedient. They want us formatted, not formed. Educated to repeat, not to create. Connected, but disconnected from deep thought.
As I write this, thousands of students around the world are being evaluated by automated systems that don’t understand ironies, contradictions, or unanswered questions. Teachers pressured by results and metrics teach how to survive the exam, not how to understand the world. And governments celebrate each new educational reform as if it were a victory, when in reality it’s just another brick in the wall of collective forgetfulness.
That’s why this book is necessary. Uncomfortable, yes. But urgent. Because it reminds us of something that all those in power would prefer us to forget: that a society that doesn’t educate for freedom ends up producing slaves who believe themselves successful.
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