Let me make something clear from the start: I am a capitalist. But before being a capitalist, I am a liberal—and freedom is priceless precisely because it cannot be priced. That said, global corporations have learned a lesson that dictatorships once understood too well: you don’t need bullets to tame bodies, nor prisons to silence minds. All you need is control of education. Make it “flexible,” “competitive,” “efficient.” In other words: mold it so that it does not think.
They Want Us Dumber, the book by Pilar Carrera Santafé and Eduardo Luque Guerrero, is not just a provocative title; it is a clinical X-ray of a global project that has turned schools into corporate training centers and students into obedient clients of their own ignorance.
Education no longer teaches people how to think—it teaches them how to perform. We no longer form citizens; we manufacture employees. Under the banner of the “knowledge society,” a system has been imposed in which real knowledge is stigmatized, replaced by a culture of academic superficiality:
rankings, rubrics, metrics, standardized tests.
Everything measured. Everything quantified. Everything standardized.
Everything perfectly stupid.
Who Designed This Mindless School?
The authors do not point to phantoms. They name the architects: the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO. The very same institutions that dictate economic policies to indebted nations now design educational frameworks under a shiny premise: align schooling with labor market needs.
But who defines these “needs”?
And why should they stand above human, cultural, ethical, or even spiritual needs?
The answer is simple—and obscene:
The goal is not to educate.
It is to program.
The ideal subject is productive, adaptable, rootless, memoryless—someone who questions nothing and consumes everything. Someone who knows how to use tools but not where they come from or why they matter. Someone who can “Google,” but cannot read a full book. Or worse, someone who no longer knows why they should.
Educational Newspeak: Competencies, Entrepreneurship, and Other Forms of Colonization
Carrera and Luque expose what many teachers experience daily but few dare to name: the language of modern education is a linguistic fraud.
- “Learning to learn” without content.
- “School entrepreneurship” for children who barely know history.
- “Competencies” that reduce thinking to a mechanical skill rather than a cultural and ethical process.
School has been emptied of meaning. Philosophy, literature, history, and art have been relegated—not because they are useless, but because they are dangerous. They do not serve employment. They serve something far more subversive: understanding the world.
A ‘Knowledge Society’ Without Knowledge
The book underscores a crucial point: contemporary education is not in crisis. It is being deliberately dismantled. And what replaces it is not a more informed society, but a more controllable one.
A “knowledge society” without real knowledge—built on data management rather than understanding. Because understanding requires time, depth, and conflict—three things neoliberal logic rejects.
Education is no longer teaching.
It is training.
And the ideal student is the one who does not interrupt, does not doubt, and does not question.
In other words: the one who does not think.
The World Bank as the New University President
The book documents—without sensationalism—how multilateral organizations shape national curricula. Not out of pedagogical concern, but out of economic necessity: they need subjects who fit the global model.
Official documents openly speak of “preparing young people for the labor market.”
What they never say—but the book exposes—is that this means stripping students of the intellectual tools that would allow them to question the system itself.
The classroom, once a space of symbolic resistance, is now an assembly line. Its goal: produce individuals trained not to think.
A “knowledge society”… without knowledge.
Nostalgia? No. A Manifesto.
They Want Us Dumber is not a lament. It is a proposal—and a warning. The authors call for a return to essential educational values: critical thinking, rigorous reading, meaningful learning, intergenerational dialogue, and ethical reflection.
Because an education that does not disturb cannot transform. A school that does not ask questions becomes a supermarket of prefabricated answers. And a society without questions becomes the ideal habitat of authoritarianism.
There is no greater victory for the system than to make its victims defend their own chains.
And in this century, the most polished chain is the school.
They want us dumber, yes.
But they also want us quiet, compliant, technical, and replaceable.
Useful—but never lucid.
An Urgent and Inconvenient Warning
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the book is not the diagnosis, but the silence that surrounds it. Why does no major outlet debate this? Why is the competency-based model imposed like dogma? Why is a student who memorizes formulas valued more than the one who asks too many questions?
The authors suggest a brutal answer:
Because they want us formatted, not formed.
Connected, but disconnected from thought.
Expert, but ignorant.
Efficient, but blind.
As you read this, millions of students are being evaluated by automated systems that cannot understand irony, contradiction, or human complexity. Teachers overwhelmed by metrics teach for tests, not for life. Governments celebrate reforms that only deepen collective amnesia.
This book is necessary—uncomfortable, yes, but urgent. It reminds us of a truth the powerful would prefer we forget:
A society that does not educate for freedom produces slaves who believe they are successful.
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