Let me make something clear from the start: I am a capitalist. But before being a capitalist, I am a liberal\u2014and 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\u2019t need bullets to tame bodies, nor prisons to silence minds. All you need is control of education. Make it \u201cflexible,\u201d \u201ccompetitive,\u201d \u201cefficient.\u201d In other words: mold it so that it does not think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They Want Us Dumber<\/em>, the book by Pilar Carrera Santaf\u00e9 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Education no longer teaches people how<\/em> to think\u2014it teaches them how to perform. We no longer form citizens; we manufacture employees. Under the banner of the \u201cknowledge society,\u201d a system has been imposed in which real knowledge is stigmatized<\/strong>, replaced by a culture of academic superficiality: 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But who defines these \u201cneeds\u201d? The answer is simple\u2014and obscene: The ideal subject is productive, adaptable, rootless, memoryless\u2014someone 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 \u201cGoogle,\u201d but cannot read a full book. Or worse, someone who no longer knows why<\/em> they should.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrera and Luque expose what many teachers experience daily but few dare to name: the language of modern education is a linguistic fraud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n School has been emptied of meaning. Philosophy, literature, history, and art have been relegated\u2014not because they are useless, but because they are dangerous. They do not serve employment. They serve something far more subversive: understanding the world<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A \u201cknowledge society\u201d without real knowledge\u2014built on data management rather than understanding. Because understanding requires time, depth, and conflict\u2014three things neoliberal logic rejects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Education is no longer teaching. The book documents\u2014without sensationalism\u2014how multilateral organizations shape national curricula. Not out of pedagogical concern, but out of economic necessity: they need subjects who fit the global model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Official documents openly speak of \u201cpreparing young people for the labor market.\u201d The classroom, once a space of symbolic resistance, is now an assembly line. Its goal: produce individuals trained not to think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A \u201cknowledge society\u201d\u2026 without knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They Want Us Dumber<\/em> is not a lament. It is a proposal\u2014and a warning. The authors call for a return to essential educational values: critical thinking, rigorous reading, meaningful learning, intergenerational dialogue, and ethical reflection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is no greater victory for the system than to make its victims defend their own chains. They want us dumber, yes. 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The authors suggest a brutal answer: 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This book is necessary\u2014uncomfortable, yes, but urgent. It reminds us of a truth the powerful would prefer we forget: 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\u2014and aren’t allowed to\u2014ask themselves why they program, for whom, and at what cost<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":364,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[106,107],"class_list":{"0":"post-462","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rotatingsigns","8":"tag-dumber","9":"tag-they-want-us-to-be-even-dumber"},"yoast_head":"\n
rankings, rubrics, metrics, standardized tests.
Everything measured. Everything quantified. Everything standardized.
Everything perfectly stupid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nWho Designed This Mindless School?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
And why should they stand above human, cultural, ethical, or even spiritual needs?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The goal is not to educate.
It is to program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nEducational Newspeak: Competencies, Entrepreneurship, and Other Forms of Colonization<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n\n\n\nA \u2018Knowledge Society\u2019 Without Knowledge<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nThe World Bank as the New University President<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What they never say\u2014but the book exposes\u2014is that this means stripping students of the intellectual tools that would allow them to question the system itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nNostalgia? No. A Manifesto.<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
And in this century, the most polished chain is the school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But they also want us quiet, compliant, technical, and replaceable.
Useful\u2014but never lucid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nAn Urgent and Inconvenient Warning<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Because they want us formatted, not formed.
Connected, but disconnected from thought.
Expert, but ignorant.
Efficient, but blind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A society that does not educate for freedom produces slaves who believe they are successful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"