From Managed Minds to Independent Minds: Why Bureaucratic Education Produces Employees, and Commicratic Education Produces Freelancers
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
Modern societies often pride themselves on the sophistication of their education systems, yet few stop to ask a more uncomfortable question: What kind of economic worker is this system actually designed to produce?
The answer becomes clear when we examine the language, structures, and behaviours that emerge from bureaucratic societies. These systems do not educate for independence; they condition for control. They do not cultivate mastery; they normalise supervision. And they do not produce free economic agents; they manufacture employees.
The very terms employee and employer reveal the architecture of bureaucratic subjugation. One is employed—placed into use—while the other employs—exerts authority. This linguistic hierarchy is not accidental; it is the end-product of an education and training model designed to keep workers psychologically dependent, procedurally obedient, and perpetually guided like protégés who are never quite trusted to stand alone.
1. Bureaucratic Education and the Psychology of Control
In bureaucratic societies, education is structured around the assumption that individuals cannot be trusted to self-direct. From early schooling to professional life, learners are taught to wait for instructions, follow prescribed methods, and seek validation from authority. Success is defined not by independent problem-solving but by compliance with externally imposed standards.
This is why bureaucratic workplaces require layers of managers, supervisors, and performance controllers. Workers are treated as if they must constantly be monitored to ensure productivity. The education system prepares them for this fate by fragmenting knowledge, discouraging initiative, and rewarding conformity. The worker is never expected to own their role—only to perform it under direction.
In such a system, expertise is deliberately incomplete. The worker is trained just enough to function, but never enough to be autonomous. This creates a permanent need for managerial oversight, reinforcing the illusion that control is necessary for order, and hierarchy is necessary for productivity.
2. Commicratic Education: Training for Independence, Not Obedience
A commicratic society begins from a radically different premise: every economic worker is an independent economic agent. Education, therefore, is not designed to create employees but to cultivate freelancers—individuals who possess full ownership of their skills, clarity of their responsibilities, and confidence in their autonomy.
In the commicratic system, what bureaucratic language calls an “employee” is, in reality, a freelance specialist, and what is called an “employer” is merely a contractor who commissions work. The relationship is not one of subjugation but of interpeer exchange. Work is not controlled; it is commissioned. Labour is not owned; it is offered.
This shift is made possible because commicratic education focuses on corposense potential—the innate capacity of individuals to master a defined skill-set rapidly and apply it repeatedly with precision. Most industries do not require workers to reinvent their role every day. They require consistency, expertise, and reliability in tasks that are structurally uniform. When individuals are trained deeply in such roles, they become independent experts in a short space of time.
Once mastery is achieved, managerial control becomes redundant.
3. The Role of Supervisory Divisions, Not Managers
Critically, commicracy does not abolish oversight—it redefines it. Instead of managerial domination, commicracy establishes supervisory-divisions alongside every employee-divisions. The purpose of supervision is not to command but to support, guide, and safeguard boundaries.
This principle is formally embedded in the Comos system (Corporatist Organisation Memorandum of Service (COMOS) ), where the Articles of Service expressly recognise the equal managerial authority of all departments within the employee-division, while clearly delineating the limited, non-intrusive responsibilities of the supervisory-division. Each worker operates within a clearly defined sphere of autonomy, with the right to determine their own working methods and craft a work–life balance aligned with personal purpose and the collective mission of the company.
In this framework, any act performed outside the powers authorised by the Comos—whether by a worker or a supervisor—is deemed ultra vires and unlawful. Authority is no longer personal or hierarchical; it is structural and bounded.
4. Why AI Makes Bureaucratic Management Obsolete
The age of Artificial Intelligence exposes the bankruptcy of bureaucratic management models. AI systems already perform scheduling, monitoring, optimisation, and quality control more efficiently than human managers ever could. Workers who are experts in their roles no longer require constant human oversight to tell them what they already know how to do.
In this new reality, the bureaucratic manager becomes an anachronism—a relic of an era when systems lacked intelligence and workers were deliberately under-trained. Commicracy recognises this shift and aligns education accordingly. Workers are trained to be self-governing professionals, capable of interfacing directly with systems, contracts, and objectives.
AI does not replace workers; it replaces unnecessary control structures.
5. Independence as the Engine of Productivity
When control is removed and replaced with autonomy, productivity does not decline—it accelerates. Independent workers upskill continuously because their economic power depends on mastery, not obedience. They do not wait to be promoted; they expand their competence. They do not fear supervision; they understand its boundaries.
Commicratic education, therefore, does not infantilise the worker. It adultifies them.
Conclusion: Reclaiming Work from Bureaucracy
Bureaucratic societies educate skilled people to be managed. Commicratic societies educate people to be managers of their own skills. One produces employees who must be told what to do; the other produces freelancers who already know.
In a world where AI governs systems and knowledge is instantly accessible, the greatest inefficiency is not technological—it is psychological. The future belongs to societies that abandon artificial subjugation and invest in independence as the organising principle of work.
Commicracy does not ask whether workers can be trusted. It is built on the certainty that they can.
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