As a former educator, the only thing I can add on top of this is that training compliance, obedience, and mindless rule-following is a feature, not a bug of the education system.
And I feel like it's drilled into instructors too.
I strongly agree. I think this has been the case for all versions of the public education system in living memory, and the main ways this has changed over the last few decades are twofold:
-More oversight and efficiency in this process is breaking down the unofficial means through which anyone got anything else out of it (e.g. real mentorship from educators who care that is not encouraged so much as tolerated by education policy, opportunities to engage with new ideas in a meaningful way, good reading recommendations, an incidental avenue into a social life)
-The structure and function of public education is increasingly infecting university curricula, structure, and priorities
I think this likely has the effect in broader society of creating less fluid competency and more blank-faced compliance, and this disproportionately affects people in key leadership roles as schooling becomes more of a selection pressure on people's career paths
I'm interested in perspectives on this from outside the US or Anglosphere generally - I'm from Australia and the education is largely similar if not worse as it inherited British hierarchicalism (is that a word? it is now!)
And I feel like it's drilled into instructors too.