Education remains a cornerstone for society as it has for decades. Technology advances, the economy fluctuates, and politics change, but education remains, 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” (Kyhall. 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 st...
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...onal and social growth.
The cost of McDonaldization is clear. In terms of standardizing education, the model is “anti-diversity, anti-creativity, and anti-democratic” (Kyhall. Online). As a whole, the consumption of the simple solution called education will not solve the problems. The modern world is much too complex to be solved in a single approach. Furthermore, education creates danger in the world by devaluing learning and dehumanizing people. Learning cannot be confined to formal allotments such as school or colleges, and in our changing times, it becomes even more imperative that education be not a product to sell but a tool to enlighten, a means to promote growth rather than division. This is the true purpose of education. And it does not come pre-packaged.
Works Cited
Gidley, J. and S. Inayatullah. Youth Futures: Comparative Research and Transformative Visions. (2002): 34.
Kyhall. "The McDonaldization of Education" 15 Nov. 2012. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.
http://fundamentalsofsoc.edublogs.org/2012/11/15/the-mcdonaldization-of-education/
McClellan, Jock. “Metaphors, Words, and Models of a Wiser World.” The Swaraj Foundation. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.
Juveniles are being taught that in order to have a nice car, branded cloths and the house of their dreams, by getting into an expensive mortgage, they have to be an employee of a huge corporation. In addition, they have to undergo to a prestigious school, study hard, have excellent grades in order to become popular and respectable in the world. However, many people would not become those super leaders, but these majority of people have a great role in the capitalism society of the US. As Gatto says, “We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair” (38). Such results are in part of a wrong education that teenagers have received trough many decades. In addition, Gatto highlights that modern educational system has been working in a six basic functions methods that makes the system strong and unbreakable: The adjustable function, indulge students to respect authorities. The integrating function, which builds the personality of the students as similar to each other as possible. The diagnostic and directive function, which allows a school to set permanent scholar grades in order to determinate his or her future role in society. The differentiating function, which gives to the student a good education and after his or her role is diagnosed, they prevent any educational progress. The selective function, function that the system has used to prevent academic growth for the non-selected students. The propaedeutic function, which works in the selection of specific groups of intellectual adults to keep perpetuating the system all over again making it a continuous sequence. (Gatto 34). Gatto’s facts revealed the survival of the educational system for decades,
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Kessler’s points are accurate. I choose this topic because I can remember countless times that my mates would question the relevancy of the information being taught to them. This is an opportunity to illustrate that this irrelevancy is the reason for high college graduate unemplo...
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Education is a vital part of society. It serves the beneficial purpose of educating our children and getting them ready to be productive adults in today's society. But, the social institution of education is not without its problems. Continual efforts to modify and improve the system need to be made, if we are to reap the highest benefits that education has to offer to our children and our society as a whole.
Education is a very important aspect of the lives of all people all over the world. What we learn, not just in the classroom, shapes who we are. We take our education everywhere we go. We use it when talking to our buddies about sports or music, we use it while solving a math problem, we use our education while debating with our family whether or not we should watch TV or go to the movies. Our education is the foundation of who we are, since every decision we make and every thought we think is dependent on what we know. Imagine how different the world would be if everyone craved learning to such a degree that at lunch tables all over the world the topic of conversation isn't who likes who, or how drunk someone got over the weekend, but it would be what books were read over the weekend, and what new ideas were thought of. This crave for learning would be an ideal but still suggests need for improvement with the current educational system. It seems that the problem with education is that somewhere along the lines the human race forgot (assuming they, at one point, understood how valuable information is) that learning is not just a mandatory process, but also an opportunity to transcend and open the gateway to a better understanding.