Instalment 6: Taught Just Enough: Education as Obedience Training

George Carlin once said that governments want people “just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.” Canada built an education system that treats that as a design brief. It produces adults who can work the systems, sign the forms, and feed the databases, but struggle to read, reason, and resist. The herd does not manage itself.

Literacy without reading

The numbers say what the report cards won’t. For at least two decades, independent studies have found that a large share of Canadian adults, including degree-holders, cannot handle complex text.

• An OECD analysis of adult skills found roughly 4 in 10 Canadian adults below Level 3 literacy, the competency considered necessary to function fully in a modern knowledge economy.
• A study for the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario concluded that the literacy levels of high‑literacy university‑educated 26–34 year olds declined more or less continuously from 1976 to 2003.
• Another multi‑university study found that 27% of Canadians with university degrees scored in the lowest two literacy levels (out of five); these graduates could “undertake tasks of limited complexity such as locating single pieces of information in short sections of text.” Numeracy was worse: 31% of degree-holders in the bottom two categories.
• PISA 2022 recorded a 10‑point drop in reading scores for Canadian 15‑year‑olds since 2018, a statistically significant slide the OECD links to weaker comprehension and less stamina with complex passages.

On paper, the system is producing graduates. In practice, many of those graduates struggle with the basic intellectual labour democracy requires: reading something difficult, holding it in their heads, and pushing back.

Watered‑down books, weaponised grades

You can see the shift in the texture of schooling itself. Textbooks that once assumed some effort now assume none. Chapters are shorter. Vocabulary is simplified. Ideas are pre‑chewed and summarised. Students are not expected to climb toward the material. The material climbs down to meet the shortest attention span in the room.

Parents have been conscripted into the herd management. Instead of demanding that schools make their children competent, many now demand that schools declare their children excellent. The mark becomes the product. The teacher becomes a service worker whose job is to deliver the A. If a teacher refuses, points out gaps, or assigns work that reveals them, the punishment is not directed at the student. It is directed at the teacher.

The result is predictable. A system organised around credential satisfaction instead of understanding will:

• Reward students for gaming the rubric, not grappling with the content.
• Punish teachers who insist on standards.
• Graduate people who can produce the assigned format on cue, the five‑paragraph essay, the group project, the slide deck, without ever being forced to develop the underlying skills those formats were supposed to train.

The literacy numbers simply quantify what the classroom culture has already normalised.

AI literacy as fear pedagogy

The same pattern repeats with artificial intelligence, where genuine literacy would mean understanding how the tools work, what they can and cannot do, and how to use them in your own interests. That is not what most Canadians are getting.

A 2026 KPMG survey found Canada lagging global peers on AI literacy and trust. Only 24% of Canadians reported receiving any AI training from their employer, and just 38% felt they had moderate or high AI knowledge, compared to 52% globally. Less than half believed they could effectively use AI tools at work. Another analysis framed AI literacy as Canada’s “next great nation‑building project” precisely because it doesn’t exist yet.

When Canadian institutions do offer “AI literacy,” they often teach something else entirely. The free university‑level course I recently took is a case study. It was marketed as AI literacy, but:

• It centred fear narratives, surveillance, bias, job loss, AI as a looming threat, rather than explaining the underlying methods (training data, gradient descent, tokenization, inference).
• It treated AI as a political character in a partisan drama, not as a technical tool to be understood and evaluated.
• It told students what to feel about AI, not how to think with and about it.

Contrast that with the University of Helsinki’s Elements of AI, a free course built for ordinary citizens. It covers what AI is, basic statistics and machine learning, how simple models are trained, what neural networks do, and why systems fail. It uses plain language, practical examples, and exercises. It assumes people can handle ideas if you respect them enough to explain.

Finland used a free course to raise citizens’ capacity. Canada used one to manage their emotions.

Professional schools: manufacturing compliant experts

By the time students reach professional faculties, the pattern is set. The law schools, medical schools, and journalism programs that claim to produce society’s critical thinkers often function as finishing schools for obedience.

Law is explicit about this. A decade ago, Canadian legal educators were already warning that law schools had failed to adapt to a changed world, still focused on doctrinal analysis rather than practice skills, ethics, or public responsibility. The curriculum overwhelmingly rewards students for mastering precedent and reproducing accepted arguments. Those who want to challenge underlying doctrines, regulatory structures, or institutional power learn quickly that the path to clerkships and jobs lies in performing the right kind of conformity.

Medical training layers hierarchy onto the same template: long hours, rigid chains of command, a culture where questioning guidelines can be framed as insubordination. A recent mixed‑methods study across professional schools found “a lack of explicit, shared critical thinking mental models between faculty and students,” meaning critical thinking is talked about but rarely taught with any precision. Students learn to pass licensing exams, not to interrogate the institutional logic behind them.

Journalism faculties are the most tragic example for this series. They did not shield their profession from the collapse. They helped prepare it for dependency.

As legacy media business models failed, journalism programs largely doubled down on old forms and narratives instead of building new ones. They trained students to fit into newsrooms that were about to shrink, then watched as those newsrooms became corporate welfare recipients. Federal subsidies and tax credits now keep many of those employers alive. Graduating into that ecosystem, students are told they are the guardians of democracy even as their paycheques depend on a state‑subsidy architecture they are discouraged from fully scrutinising.

A 2024 Fraser Institute paper put it plainly: federal support for journalism “discourages innovation” and keeps legacy models on life support instead of letting new ones emerge. Innovation, it concludes, will have to come from independent creators and new entrants, not from organisations whose business model is preserving their own existence with government help. Journalism schools, instead of teaching students how to build those alternatives, mostly continued to train them for jobs in a sector that now survives on subsidies and brand nostalgia.

The result is an “expert” class across professions that is very good at operating within existing systems and very poor at challenging their assumptions.

Herded from birth

Taken together, the picture is not subtle:

• A K–12 system that dilutes content, inflates grades, and trains students to equate “I got an A” with “I understand this.”
• Universities that admit under‑prepared students, rarely remediate their deficits, and graduate a significant number who still struggle with complex reading and numeracy.
• Professional schools that reward compliance to institutional norms and send graduates into sectors now structurally dependent on the very state their work is supposed to hold to account.
• An AI literacy landscape where the dominant tone is fear and politics, not technical clarity and agency.

Carlin’s line was supposed to be a joke. In Canada, it reads like a planning document.

If you design schools that reward obedience, de‑emphasise deep reading, and teach the most powerful new technology in a century as a haunted house rather than a tool, you do not get citizens. You get operators. People trained to work inside systems they cannot understand, hired into professions that tell them they are “experts” while treating them as replaceable components.

Such a population is very good at following orders, collecting data, filling forms, and administering other people’s compliance. It is much less good at noticing when the order itself is illegitimate, the data is being misused, or the form is a trap. That is not an accident. That is herd management, starting in kindergarten.

KlueIQ exists because the schools would not change. If the official curriculum trains you to solve pre‑baked problems for someone else, KlueIQ trains you to notice that the problem itself is rigged. Where classrooms reward the right answer on the rubric, KlueIQ rewards seeing the pattern behind the case, the gap in the narrative, the tell in the herd.

It is not a “game” in the way school is a game. It is an anti‑curriculum: a place where you practise inference instead of obedience, pattern recognition instead of memorization, and independent risk‑calculus instead of whatever the latest “follow the science” slogan tells you to think. Herd Nation describes the architecture. KlueIQ is where you learn to slip through the gaps.

Additional research from Perplexity