Karen De Coster on Life as a Trained Monkey:

There are plenty of (supposedly) “smart” people who can be trained, like a monkey, to cram for an exam (or exams); get a college degree; remember procedures related to an occupation; take steps to complete a task, etc., etc. It is the use of critical thinking that demonstrates the difference between being smart and possessing intelligence (intellectual ability).

As a Certified Public Accountant working for many years in public and corporate accounting, with lots of colleagues who are endowed with CPAs, MBAs, etc., I am not hesitant to say that there are many very well-trained monkeys in the workplace, but very few critical thinkers

My assessment is drawn from my many years in corporate America, dealing with extraordinarily bright people, competent people, and mostly, those people whom I refer to as the “daily transactional types”—the ones who need to be trained what tasks to do on what days, and they will do it, but don’t dare ask them to think, and don’t expect them to assess or analyze anything that falls outside of their neatly-designed, one-dimensional box.

For many people, their job is their life because it is something they are “trained” to do. It’s all they have outside of kids, a lawn to cut, and golf on Sundays.  For me, my formal education garnered me an established career—a satisfactory and oftentimes challenging occupation that both feeds and funds my passions. If I knew little about the world outside of my job, the one-dimensional life would crush me with boredom and leave me with the life of a trained monkey.