I would tend to disagree. I am pretty much "picking up" Perl as I go along, and I never took any Perl classes or finished reading a Perl book (yes, I started reading it, but never finished. However, I've been coding in different languages for last 15 years, and hope I understand the value of commenting/testing my code. So, when I was learning Perl, and I just found out about "use strict", I have this option in every one of my scripts - especially in production (even though someone here in PM told me I don't need it in production as the bugs were fixed in dev/testing phase).

In my opinion, it is the people who don't care about the result of their work or just can't think logically would comment out "use strict".

And I agree with you that such people should be educated. I usually say to them "If I place a high-voltage transformer box here, all warning labels from it, and make you maintain it - would you do it, and how comfortable would you feel?". There's nothing like real-life examples...