McDonaldization of Education
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Despite the changing times, education remains a cornerstone for society . Technology advances, the economy fluctuates, and politics change, but education remains something seen as, not only important but imperative for personal and social growth. Yet, as important as it is touted to be, the quality and purpose of learning is often lost in the assembly-line, manufactured process of education that exists today.
In a highly structured and economics-driven world, the educational system may be viewed as a machine designed to churn out future workers and employees. Like the fast-food industry, education has been standardized in an attempt to provide the comforts of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. In our aptly named McDonaldized society, aspects as important as quality are sacrificed in lieu of speed and profit. As far as education is concerned, however, this attempt to systemize and order something as complex as learning proves futile and detrimental to the basic tenet of enlightenment.
The standardization of the learning process proposes a simplified, singular approach to providing education to those who can afford it. Limiting material provided and lessons taught, tests, grading, function to create an easily controlled system. “Education” has been transformed and has come to connote “the transmission from a central source of knowledge to passive recipients” (McClellan. Online). However, the question remains whether this definition can actually suffice. The futility of a packaged education is put into context when it is realized that “meaningful learning, deep knowledge, collective wisdom and innovative action do not come from slick, pre-packaged course materials and efficient one-way transmission of information” but rather through the more complex idea called learning (McClellan. Online).
Unfortunately, the purpose of the education system, as seen in most institutions of higher education, is in fact to instill in people the notion that they are incapable of learning. The standardization of education highlights the underlying assumption that people “cannot learn without a pre-determined set of institutionalized options forced upon them” (Jain. Online).
The view of education as a commodity, rather than a means for intellectual, spiritual, or interpersonal growth, results in most educators and teachers offering students a fractionalized and fragmented view of the world. The relevance of topics discussed in the classroom are questionable. The material taught is simply that which the teacher views as relevant. There is no factual basis to determine whether what is being taught is important. Instead, educators should aim to provide a wealth of information to students and foster an environment in which creativity and curiosity are encouraged. In reality, however, students are force-fed information that may hold little interest or relevance to them and are barred from formulating their personal opinions about the world around them, a world of which they are a part, and a world of which they are expected to become members once formal education has ceased.
Seeking to transform people into capital rather than free-thinking individuals, standardization in education deadens any natural desire for learning and creates resentment toward the education system. Research into the future of todays youth suggest that “young people in the West are negative and fearful about their futures, disenchanted and disempowered by their education, and have a sense that there is a spiritual vacuum in their society” (Gidley 34). The rigidity of the education system that has very little to offer intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually causes many people to give up altogether on a system .
The largest danger of standardized education, therefore, lies in its dehumanizing approach. By eliminating the human element from learning, the system serves to alienate individuals who do not subscribe to the idea of formal, cookie-cutter education. The McDonaldization of education “holds in contempt those who do not like its homogenized options – labeling these resistors as uneducated, superstitious, backward” (Jain. Online). This inherently anti-learning approach eliminates the possibility of education for all, limiting the option to a select group of individuals willing to abide by the institutions rigid