Ad Infinitum, Ad Nauseam

Greetings, gentle readers.
One of the great men whom I have the honour of knowing was just interviewed by my old university chum, Todd Babiuk.  Dr. Peter Hackett was asked to explain the culture of innovation in Canada, or lack thereof.  The interview can be found here:
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/Canada+failing+create+culture+innovation/4095349/story.html
The interview followed hard upon an interview Dr. Hackett did with the Canadian Science Policy Centre, and can be viewed on YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNhW0ErMXNA
Here's my response (for those of you who haven't heard me blather this already):
I will try and compose a more comprehensive response soon, but my knee-jerk reaction at the moment seems to rest with a couple of comments that seem nested in the middle of the interview.  There is an issue with gauging the amount of successful innovation in a society or culture by using a monetary scale.  That strikes me as a topic for lively discussion, but skirts what I consider to be the point: how does one foster a culture of innovation, risk-taking, creativity, etc.?
Seems almost corollary to Aristotle's challenge to define "the good life."  I reckon that Peter touched on some areas of the solution—most saliently, how NOT to do so.  "Streaming", "tracking", and all those other educational buzzwords sound great when designing pedagogical approaches to conditioning and developing the human mind for achievement, but are symptomatic of the character from H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" who proclaims that the only way to defeat the Martians is to go underground, and teach children SCIENCE,
and not (if memory serves correctly) "poems and all that rubbish."
Students have been increasingly treated as a commodity, rather than potential creators of their own values.  Schools have become less concerned with a liberal arts education, and more preoccupied with training toward an economically-specific skill-based objective.
I reckon that the answer to many of these questions—why does Canada have such a low rate of PhD. graduates?  Why is entrepreneurialism not viewed as a significant or even viable contributor to a nation's well-being?
The answer may be rooted in the failure of our educational system to foster critical thinking, epistemological discussion, the love of learning, and an ongoing inquiry into the human condition as preconditions for understanding technical and scientific principles.
Why get a PhD., when a technical certificate will get you the job in fibre-optics that you want?  If students feel compelled to learn more, understand more, APPLY more, then they will push the envelope to extend the body of knowledge that defines their disciplines.
I reckon that we've thought too much about what kids learn, but not how or why, and that's the fundamental basis of my analysis.  At least for the time being.
Cheers,
—mARKUS