> education being about producing pliant workers over independent, thinking human beings.

You cant have things like computers and smart phones if you dont have millions of pliant workers mass producing them for you. If you want the technological world that we live in to be possible then you should accept that it requires this concept. If everybody is a creative independant free thinking individual, then nobody is a worker drone in a factory churning out phones, laptops, or the materials and components that go into them.

Generations of wave solder machines and pick-and-place machines beg to differ...