McEducation
for All?
opening a
dialogue around UNESCO’s vision for commoditizing learning
August
2003
the
voices from civil society include:
Shilpa Jain, Manish Jain, Pat Farenga, Munir Fasheh, Paige Raibmon, Vivek Bhandari,
Yusef Progler, Lisa Aubrey, Sanat Mohanty, Ram Subramanian, Zaid Hassan, Jan
Visser, Vachel Miller, Vineeta
Sood, Linda Mbonambi, Gustavo
Esteva, Dania Quirola, Rick Smyre,
Jenny Gidley, Bob Stigler, David Wolsk,
Ashish Kejriwal, Sylvia Lee, Jamie Schweser, Venkatesh Iyer, Arif Tabassum, Nitin Paranjape, Fode Beaudet, Ekundayo J. D. Thompson,
Ash Hartwell, Paul Cienfuegos, Nesar Ahmad, Manish Bapna, Makarand Paranjape,
Prashant Varma and Jock McClellan
copyleft* August 2003
* Material may be reproduced and
shared freely with authors and source acknowledged.
An
Invitation to the Reader
We thought it might be appropriate to state at the outset what this dialogue is not about. This might help to clarify our intent and help pull us out of certain dead-end debates -- and enter into new generative questions/conversations.
First and foremost, this dialogue is not a personal attack on John Daniel, UNESCO or even McDonald's. We have no personal vendetta to carry out against any of these entities. We name them only to better help us understand the current state of affairs in the world today.
Second, this dialogue is not only about higher education. McEducation for All has larger implications for entire education system ¾ primary, secondary, adult, vocational, non-formal ¾ as well as the larger universe of lifelong learning.
Third, this dialogue is not only about public vs. private control of education. It makes little difference whether the education system is in the hands of the public sector (the government) or in the hands of the private sector (multinational, transnational or national companies). For people, the result is similar: an invasive assault on their own knowledges, meanings, experiences, values, dreams, visions and practices of living.
We see Daniel’s editorial as starting point for initiating a larger dialogue – about the commodification of learning, and therefore, the commoditization of living. Though the editorial specifically mentions commoditizing learning materials, it is clear that this only makes sense within a certain container ¾ a frame in which learning roles, relationships, contexts, content is held.
We hope you will take the variety of issues, questions and concerns they raise around commoditization, as an opportunity to engage with this larger dialogue. This dialogue has come together in three rounds, over the span of several months. The first round extends the McDonald's metaphore to raise several questions about the Education for All program. The second round builds upon these questions with more critical insights into different aspects of Daniel's editorial specifically and McDonaldization more broadly. The third rounds elaborates on these critiques and offers suggestions for freeing ourselves from the traps of commoditization.
We invite you to join us in this dialogue. Please share your
comments, questions and reactions with us at shikshantar@yahoo.com
or on www.swaraj.org/shikshantar.
"HIGHER
EDUCATION FOR SALE"
FROM EDUCATION TODAY: THE
NEWSLETTER OF UNESCO'S EDUCATION SECTOR (OCTOBER - DECEMBER 2002)
The
hue and cry about the ‘McDonaldization’ of education should make us reach for
our critical faculties. First, despite their ubiquity, McDonald’s restaurants
account for only a tiny proportion of the food that people eat. Second,
McDonald’s is successful because people like their food. Third, their secret is
to offer a limited range of dishes as commodities that have the same look,
taste and quality everywhere.
Commoditization.
It’s an ugly word that my spellchecker rejects. But it is a key process for
bringing prosperity to ordinary people by giving them greater freedom and wider
choice. Products that were once hand crafted and expensive become standardized,
mass produced and inexpensive. Personal computers and cellular telephones used
to be specialized items for the elite. Today they are mass-market consumer
items.
When
products become commodities there is fierce price competition between
manufacturers and profit margins are squeezed. Producers hate this and
industries often have to restructure, but consumers benefit greatly.
What
are the implications for education? Is the commoditization of learning material
a way to bring education to all? Yes it is, and open universities in a number
of countries have shown the way. By developing courseware for large numbers of
students they can justify the investment required to produce high quality
learning materials at low unit cost.
Such
materials can be used successfully outside their country of origin after local
adaptation and translation. Commoditizing education need not mean
commercializing education. The educational community should adopt the model of
the open source software movement. We can imagine a future in which teachers
and institutions make their courseware and learning materials freely available
on the web. Anyone else can translate and adapt them for local use provided
they make their new version freely available too.
In
this way, teachers all over the world can be freed from the chore of
reinventing the wheel of basic content. They can then concentrate on adapting
the best material, helping students to study it and assessing their competence
and knowledge. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown the way by
making its own web materials available free. Let’s hope this heralds a
worldwide movement to commoditize education for the common good.
- John Daniel
Assistant Director-General for Education, UNESCO
Round 1
"The
idea that technology is neutral is itself not neutral— it directly serves the
interests of the people who benefit from our inability to see where the
juggernaut is headed…
We
must raise questions about whether technological society has lived up to its
advertising, and also to address some grave concerns about its future
direction. Until now we have been impotent in the face of the juggernaut,
partly because we are so unpracticed in technological criticism. We don’t
really know how to assess new or existing technologies. It is apparent that we
need a new, more holistic language for examining technology, one that would
ignore the advertised claims, best-case visions, and glamorous imagery that
inundate us and systematically judge technology from alternative perspectives:
social, political, economic, spiritual, ecological, biological, military.
Who
gains? Who loses? Do the new technologies serve planetary destruction or
stability? What are their health effects? Psychological effects? How do they
affect our interaction with and appreciation of nature? How do they interlock
with existing technologies? What do they make possible that could not exist
before? What is being lost? Where is it all going? Do we want that?"
- Jerry Mander
In the Absence of the Sacred, 1996
We recently came across John Daniel’s
editorial note, “Higher Education for Sale”, in UNESCO’s Education for All
bulletin (October 2002). It raises several serious questions regarding the
agenda and vision of the Education for All global initiative. Is UNESCO
promoting the commoditization and homogenization of human learning? How could
it suggest that the multinational corporation McDonald’s is a good model for
the world's education systems (particularly those in the Global South) to
emulate? What is UNESCO and EFA’s
stance regarding the Global Economy?
What is perhaps most disturbing about
Mr. Daniel's note is the lack of critical analysis about the long-term harmful
effects of McDonaldization – not as a chain of fast-food restaurants, but as a
larger process of rationalization of society.[1]
Mr. Daniel’s key premise is that McDonaldization brings prosperity, freedom and
wider choice. Yet, as members of civil society, we feel it is precisely this
claim that needs to be more critically interrogated.[2] In this spirit, we would like to take the
analogy of McDonald's a bit further in order to explore its implications for
education and local communities in more detail.
What
is the effect of McDonald’s on our health and well-being?
The food on McDonald’s menu may fill
one's stomach quickly and cheaply, but its impact on our health is dubious at
best. High in fat, low in fiber, hamburgers and fries (the food McDonald’s is
famous for) have contributed to rising cholesterol rates and growing obesity —
the tickets to a slow demise via heart disease, diabetes or cancer. Plus, given how hamburger meat is produced
(through factory farms and squalid slaughterhouses) there also exists the
serious threat of tragic death from Mad Cow Disease or infection by the E. Coli
bacterium. The fast-food lifestyle does not bode well for our social or
emotional health either. Food-on-the-go sadly signals
relationships-out-the-window. It suits those who have little time to be with
their families or friends, much less to engage in meaningful conversations or
creative expressions. McDonaldization thus spreads sickness and undermines both
healthy individuals and vibrant communities -- the public is left to bear the
costs of the industry’s private profit.
In relation to education, we must ask,
if the commoditization of learning materials (even if they happen to be from
MIT) can lead to imagination, to holistic analysis, to deep ethics, to greater
self-awareness? Or does it simply mean feeding people more decontextualized
information (which is irrelevant at best, and neo-colonizing/debilitating at
worst)? While being able to buy commodified degrees on the open market,
alongside cell phones and personal computers, will surely benefit the
middle-men of the Global Economy and those who run open universities, it is
highly doubtful that it will really nourish and inspire most individuals and
communities in the Global South.[3]
What
is required to sustain the McDonald’s model?
To more fully evaluate the McDonald's
model, it is important to understand what is required to keep the golden arches
standing. The McDonald's menu does not function in isolation, it requires an
entire sub-structure to fuel it and an entire super-structure to manage it.
Though it is true that McDonald's only feeds a small portion of the world's
population, its footprint on the planet is quite significant.
Internally, the fast-food industry has
been shown to dehumanize its own employees, leaving them with little mobility,
few benefits or security, and no chance of organizing for change. The
assembly-line fragmentation, mechanized technologies and surveillance
techniques eliminate individual uniqueness, judgement and creativity (and the
natural mistakes that emerge from these), which is what guarantees the “same
look, taste and quality everywhere.”
Consumers fare no better -- they are counted only as “numbers
served.” Like the cows and chickens at
factory-farms, customers are coldly and efficiently herded through McDonald's
superficial system without being touched by it. Little or no emotional bond is allowed to develop among
customers, employees, managers and owners. Indeed, McDonaldization intent is to
take the "human-ness" of human beings out of the equation altogether.
Externally, McDonald’s and its
like-minded clones have devoured diversity in both local economies and the
environment. Roughly 75% of the money spent at corporate franchises like
McDonald's is immediately sucked out of the local economy, thus further
impoverishing many communities.[4]
Small family-owned restaurants have gone bankrupt when forced to compete with
deep-pocket fast-food corporations. The small farmer has been crushed by the
growth of "factory farms", where livestock is raised in horrifying
conditions, fed the dismembered parts of their own species, pumped full of
antibiotics, and murdered in massive slaughterhouses. Global control is
centralized in the hands of McDonald’s and its few “certified” suppliers.[5]
They see no harm in clear-cutting rainforests (hundreds of acres of land a
day), or in contributing to a worldwide water crisis, in order to meet the
demands of industrialized livestock production. Transporting food across the
world, as well as elaborately packaging it, further adds to global
pollution.
If one accounts for the hidden costs of
McDonaldization, it becomes clear that the model is anti-diversity,
anti-creativity and anti-democratic. We must ask what else would be killed — in
terms of diverse ways of knowing, languages, dynamic roles and
responsibilities, local cultures and contexts — if education continues to
follow the same violent and unsustainable course?
What
about vegetarians, vegans, diabetics, heart patients, slow food activists,
those who do not like greasy food, etc.?
One must also question the
"fact" that people like
McDonald's processed food. Lest we forget, the fast-food industry spends
billions of dollars a year on advertising to convince us of this. They
manipulatively market to children (preying upon their sense of loneliness,
insecurity and boredom) and to parents (preying on their sense of guilt) to
secure a captive audience for generations. And what about those of us who
really don’t want to eat fast food?
Must we all be forced to eat it, even if we believe it is unethical
and/or harmful to us? Do we have the choice to say no, or better yet, grow our
own organic foods? Or will we be
ostracized as "fundamentalists" or “impractical health freaks” if we
try to exercise this basic aspect of human dignity?
The same queries apply to education and
its lack of respect for diverse learners. Commoditization pro-actively creates
a situation of artificial scarcity in order to establish and maintain a niche
in the market. This requires devaluing the spontaneity and multiplicity of
learning spaces and learning styles, intelligences, expressions, worldviews,
etc. that exist in the world and instead, marketing a single homogenous
commodity called “education” that all must consume.
The McDonaldization of education must
be exposed for what it really is – a techno-fascist imposition that gives the
illusion of free choice and equality. It represents a lack of faith in each and
every human being’s capacities to decide upon and create their own learning
communities, and assumes they cannot learn (or eat or create anything) without
a pre-determined set of institutionalized options forced upon them. Worse yet,
it holds in contempt those who do not like its homogenized options – labelling
these resistors as “uneducated”, “superstitious”, “backward”, etc. At its core,
it is inherently anti-learning.
It is time for us to face the harsh
reality that much of the schooling (formal as well as non-formal) process is
already McDonaldized i.e., run according to a highly centralized,
one-size-fits-all, assembly-line mass production model which views human beings
as “capital” or “human resources”. For the vast majority of people, such type
of factory-education has become a mind-numbing, relationship-numbing and
soul-numbing experience. It does not and cannot bring about profound forms of
learning in the world. Rather than further hyping and expanding the reach of
the fast-food solution, we invite you to join us in a much-needed process of
fundamentally rethinking the Education for All global initiative — particularly
its core assumptions around the purposes and processes of learning and its view
of human beings vis-à-vis the Global Economy.
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. MIT knows
this, every lifelong learner understands this, why doesn't UNESCO and the EFA
global initiative? The time has come for us to move beyond having dehumanizing
solutions continually imposed upon us by distant experts (who do not know us and
don’t really care to know us) and, to work together to co-create more diverse
and nourishing learning opportunities for ourselves and our children. We should
not be afraid to reinvent the wheel again and again. Indeed, that may be
required if we wish to reclaim and regenerate the essence of learning in the 21st
century, and to create a more just and peaceful world for all.
-
SHIKSHANTAR ANDOLAN
Shilpa
Jain and Manish Jain
April
10, 2003
“At the
turn of the 20th century, a profound social thinker in France named
George Simmel wrote a remarkable book called The Philosophy of Money. In
it, Simmel said that money contained a powerful internal contradiction build
into the foundations of its abstract existence: by robbing things of their
innate identity and replacing that core identity with a money identity, money
often cheapened things and removed their significance! Simmel said that
whenever genuine personal qualities like services were offered for money,
[they] tended to gradually become degraded, to lose distinction… The sale of
compassion, the sale of concern, even the sale of a helping hand in many
instances, lead to the same destination.
At some point, pricing eats away the intangible quality of service and
the central value of what is offered will be destroyed…”
- John Taylor Gatto
“Beyond Money: Deschooling and a New Society”
Reading “Higher Education For Sale”
proved to me, again, that the education establishment is so slow on its feet.
Using McDonald’s as the model for creating a successful and efficient
educational system to deliver generic “basic content” is an insight that may have
been sensible in the late twentieth century, when McDonald’s expanded into a
worldwide business and made gobs of money.
Now, at the dawn of the 21st century, McDonald’s has posted its first loss
ever. It is shutting down stores and tinkering with its menu. Burger King, by
the way, is not in much better shape financially. People’s diets and
perceptions of hamburger fast food have changed, but the big corporations
didn’t realize it until recently. Educators are excited about this model in the
public sector now that it is showing its obsolescence in the private sector!
The one-size-fits-all hamburger has reached the point of diminishing returns.
Attempts to “personalize” the burger, to give people “choice,” to “have it
their way,” have finally stopped fooling people. These are not “choices,” just
condiments and dressings that any decent restaurant would give you without
making it a sales point. No matter how you dress it up, you’re eating a
hamburger, not exercising personal freedom. Ivan Illich referred to this
confusion of process with substance in Deschooling
Society, when he wrote, (I think) “The mandatory selection of pre-packaged
commodities is hardly a choice.”
But people’s tastes change. People grow up. Diets change. To keep up with the
changing market, McDonald’s and Burger King are offering more choices on their
menus, increasing, not limiting their range of dishes. The editorial misses the
boat on this point too.
The editorial states that McDonald’s restaurants account “for only a tiny
portion of the food that people eat.” However, the author’s proposal to
“commoditize learning material [as] a way to bring education to all” is a vast
program no matter how you parse that sentence. This has many important
implications. For example, there will have to be government resources devoted
to keeping charlatans out of the business, so there will probably be FDA
(Federal Diploma Agency) labels for content levels of individual courses. For
instance:
This
serving of Accounting 101 contains:
90%
Math
5%
General Reading
This
serving also contains less than 5% of the following subjects the FDA deems
vital to a well-balanced education:
Foreign
language, Science. Social Studies
Trace elements of philosophy, literature, art, music, and poetry are at levels
well below those considered dangerous by the FDA.
McDonald’s
Education:
Bringing
a smile with every course served. u
A Recipe for Wiping
Out What Is Left of Diversity and Humanity, And a Call for a Fundamentalist and
Lazy Attitude
Munir Fasheh, Arab Education Forum, Palestine
<mfasheh@yahoo.com>
I keep hoping that educators would some
day heal from some of the assumptions that have controlled the thinking and
practice in education for the past few centuries. One would think that (after such a long time) educators would
realize the harm that these assumptions inflict on teachers and students
alike. But, I guess I am assuming too
much. Educators in general seem to be
the least able to learn.
When I read what John Daniel wrote, I
felt very disturbed and sad. I will
highlight some of the embedded assumptions to clarify why I felt the way I did.
First: the assumption that there are
people who can think and people who can, at most, apply or adapt what
“thinkers” come up with! Mr. Daniel
tells us that people (especially teachers) in most cultures do not have to think
for themselves, and that he wants to free them “from the chore of reinventing
the wheel… [and instead] concentrate on adapting the best material, helping
students to study it and assessing their competence and knowledge.” It is very hard to think of anything more
humiliating to human beings, and particularly teachers, than relieving them
from doing what I feel is the most fundamental human right and duty: to think;
i.e. to create meaning, understanding and knowledge. Despising people is not the invention of Mr. Daniel of course; it
has characterized the past 500 years at least.
What Mr. Daniel is doing is continuing and spreading it. For an educator in a responsible position to
look at teachers as mere implementers and adapters, and still call them
‘teachers’ and still call the process ‘learning’, is very disturbing.
Second: the assumption that people in a
place like MIT can know what is good
for people and countries in Africa or Asia, without knowing Africa or
Asia. Even when such people visit these
places, they stay in a Hilton, talk with graduates from MIT, and – in order to
sound authentic – they may go to a street and talk with some “ordinary folks,”
and they may even quote them! If Mr.
Daniel did not yet discover that the main characteristic of institutions is
deception, he probably needs to think again, but more honestly. Believing that a person or a group in a
place like MIT can “cook” something that is good for all the peoples of the
world is a very frightening attitude. Most professors at MIT hardly know, or
talk with, the person in the office next door. They are mainly interested in
their careers. And Mr. Daniel believes
that they know what is good for people in Africa, Asia, and South and Central
America?
Third: the assumption that people can
really be measured. It is very hard for
me to think of any idea, throughout history, that is more degrading to human
beings than the invention of grading.
Fourth: the assumption that there is
“best material” that is good for all, everywhere, and that the role of teachers
is just to adapt it, as Mr. Daniel claims.
Although the term fundamentalism usually refers to religion, but I think
that its most successful – though subtle – form is education. Mr. Daniel’s call falls under the category
of fundamentalism at a level which is deeper and, thus, more dangerous than
what is usually referred to in common discourse. If believing in something that is good for all people, and that
someone at MIT knows it and someone at UNESCO can impose it, is not fundamentalism
par excellence, I don’t know what fundamentalism is.
Mr. Daniel does not have to tell
educators to follow McDonald’s.
Historically speaking, it was the other way round. It is McDonald’s that
emulated education and followed its model. However, because education is supported
by governments through compulsory laws, it did not need to be as inventive as
McDonald’s in marketing and selling its junk; it relied on enforcing the
law. McDonald’s had to be more
inventive in marketing its commodity. Cooking and packaging information and
selling it to students all over the world was first done at a universal level
by education. Since McDonald’s was less successful in convincing governments to
pass a law concerning “compulsory eating of junk,” they had to package their
product in an attractive and deceptive way.
Schools, as usual, lag behind in such matters.
My understanding is that UNESCO was
created to respect and protect the diverse cultures that existed for thousands
of years. UNESCO is one of the few
organizations that remain to protect diverse ways of living, learning, and
knowing. Using it as a forum to claim
that all what teachers can do is to be imitators and/or adaptors is a very sad
situation. It is an abuse of the
mandate of UNESCO. UNESCO is supposed to protect spaces where people can live
according to their own ways, and not be forced to “develop” according to a
prescribed formula or ready recipe.
Please, let us not repeat one of the most notorious deeds in history,
where the major institutions (the state, the church, the law, and education,
supported by the financial sector and the police) collaborated to finish what
armies were not able to finish – the killing of cultures and ways of living and
learning and relating within indigenous communities in the Americas and
Australia. And that was done, of course, claiming that the purpose was to help
indigenous peoples develop and become knowledgeable and civilized!
What Mr. Daniel is advocating is to
repeat this, but this time in a more subtle way and worldwide! UNESCO was created to protect cultures and
peoples from all forms of destruction but, especially, from forms that claim to
be “universal.” Please, Mr. Daniel,
keep UNESCO outside this path. Thank you. u
The
McDonaldization of Education: Colonialism Revisited
Paige Raibmon, Simon Fraser University, Canada
<praibmon@sfu.ca>
Assistant
Director-General for Education at UNESCO John Daniel urges us to “reach for our
critical faculties” when evaluating the so-called “McDonaldization” of
education. Yet his own brief statement on the question is at best impoverished
and at worst misleading. Rather than
elaborating further on the analogy so usefully extended by Shikshantar, I’d
like to offer a historical analogy to the “McDonaldization” process that Daniel
espouses.
Daniel anchors his editorial note
around the twin notions of commoditization and commercialization. As a historian, it was another “c”-word that
came to mind when I read his note: colonialism. His proposition is a profoundly colonialist one. This is not the first time that we have
heard the benefits of homogeneity and standardization touted. Colonizers have sung variations on this
theme many times over. Daniel’s certitude
that the standardization and mass production of education will bring “greater
freedom and wider choice”1 evokes an era when people spoke – some naively, some
self-servingly – of the benefits that the “rest” stood to gain from the
“west.”
It is impossible today to uncritically laud the benefits of empire for
colonized populations. For indigenous
peoples of the Americas, as for populations of the Global South, colonization
by European powers resulted in death from epidemic disease, dispossession from
land and resources, and the destruction of local social, economic, political,
ecological and cultural orders. All of
this occurred on a scale that falls well within the definition of genocide as
defined by the United Nations convention. And, all of this occurred within an
ideological context that uncritically accepted the assumption that these
so-called peripheral populations had nothing to lose and everything to gain
from the globalization of community, the homogenization of values, and the
commodification of resources.
Educational policy was a cornerstone of colonial projects around the
globe. In Canada, for example, Christian missionaries walked in stride with the
earliest fur traders to offer religious instruction. Indigenous children became particular targets of educational
transformation, as they were seen both as less recalcitrant and less prone to
“regression” than were adults. The
erroneous assumption that an absence of schools signalled an absence of teaching
and learning blinded colonizers to the long-standing practices of local
education that had sustained indigenous communities for generations. In this context, it seemed as though these
untrained, undisciplined children – these “wild Indians” – would do nothing but
benefit from the rigours of an English-style grammar school. This educational ideal – this McDonaldized
orientation – involved children spending days, months, and sometimes years away
from their families and communities; but, this was hardly a drawback, since
indigenous homes were viewed as educational deserts.
From the 17th through 19th centuries colonial
educators experimented with various prototypes: mission schools, day schools,
on-reserve boarding schools, off-reserve boarding schools. By the end of the 19th century,
the preferred mode of colonial education in Canada had become the industrial
training school, in which children lived far – sometimes hundreds of miles –
from home, separated from their extended family as well as from siblings of the
opposite sex. They ate foreign food, wore foreign clothes, spoke foreign
languages. Their names were replaced
with identification numbers. They
learned a foreign curriculum that all too often left them alienated from their
home communities, at the same time as it left them unprepared to live
independently in non-indigenous communities.
Half the day was spent on half-hearted academic subjects and the other
on manual skills training that most often amounted to hard physical labour that
subsidized the school’s operation. The
system was standardized across the country and ran from the 1880s through the
1980s. Here perhaps is the true
fore-runner to commodified education.
Daniel’s self-assured comment that commodified education “is a key
process for bringing prosperity to ordinary people by giving them greater
freedom and wider choice” may well echo the words uttered by residential school
principals to parents desperate to spare their children this educational
assault.
The very logic by which Daniel asks us to “reach for our critical faculties”
is the same by which the children of the First Nations of Canada were in
practice kidnapped from their homes and, for all intents and purposes, interned
at “schools.” Residential schools did
more to slam shut the doors of opportunity, freedom and choice than they did to
open them for indigenous children. The
schools became hothouses of abuse and suffering. Federal Department of Indian Affairs records show that in the
late 19th century, a quarter of all residential school students died
while on the school rolls or shortly thereafter. This death rate rises to 69% where post-schooling health is
factored in.2 Children were
the victims not only of illness but of widespread physical and sexual abuse
too.3 The emotional toll of these ordeals is, of
course, nearly impossible to tally. It
most certainly extends across generations and has been considered under the
rubric of intergenerational trauma comparable to the Holocaust.4 Physical and emotional ill-health have been
the legacy, and for this the Canadian government and several churches have
formally apologized. Today, the schools
are widely regarded one of the most tragic products of colonialism’s
conceit.
Education was a commodity in residential schools, and indigenous
children were likewise treated as such: they were products to be scrubbed clean
of their individual selves, as they passed through the factory institution,
emerging uniformly neat, subservient, and assimilated. Indigenous peoples suffer the devastation of
this process still. Any sincere injunction to “reach for our critical
faculties” cannot shrink from historical investigation. And, any sincere historical investigation
reveals that horror more than health and happiness has been the legacy of
earlier attempts at “McDonaldization.”
The questions hangs: why ought we to expect anything different in the
future? u
Newe Sogobia: The Western Shoshone People and
Land
“In Indian terms
there is no equation in dollars for the loss of a way of life. … There is a story that the old people
tell about the white man. They are
like children. They want this and
that, they want everything they see, like it’s the first time on
Earth. The white men have all
these tools but they don’t know how to use them properly. The white people try to equate national
defense with human lives. There
can never be an equation between dollar bills and living things – the
fish, the birds, the deer, the clean air, the clean water. There is no way of comparing them…”
- Glen Wasson
McDonaldization
and Historical Myopia
Vivek Bhandari, Hampshire College, United States
<vbhandari@hampshire.edu>
It is deeply disturbing to see decision
makers at UNESCO's "Education for All" campaign argue that the
McDonald's Corporation's approach to commodification is an acceptable, indeed
laudable, model for those thinking about the future of education in the new
millennium. This is not only because John Daniel seems to have missed the
voluminous literature on the horrors associated with what George Ritzer has
called the "McDonaldization of Society" – aspects of which are
effectively outlined by Shikshantar – but also in the fact that his approach to
education suffers from a myopic and uncritical belief in the hopelessly facile
"trickle-down" view of the world.
I say these things in large part because Daniel's perspective — that
commoditization is good for society since it allows large sections of the
world's population to "benefit greatly" from the products once
accessible only to the elite — completely fails to take into account the
contested history of market capitalism and "Development." For someone
to say that "when products become commodities there is fierce price
competition," and to assume that this is inevitably a good thing, is far
too simplistic, as is the notion that "commoditizing education need not
mean commercializing education." The history of the entrenchment of many
modernist institutional structures and practices (such as those associated with
the state, corporations, civil society, etc.) IS the history of commodification and McDonaldization. This
history, in turn, is comprehensively intertwined with the history of Empire,
the contradictions of nation-state formation, and the increasingly hegemonic
forms taken by the neo-liberal consensus that has been emerging in the
post-Cold War period.
Perhaps most disturbing is Daniel's inability to recognize that the world has
already gone through centuries of dehumanizing institutionalization
masquerading as “educational reform”, “development”, or “liberalization.”
Daniel's view, that price reduction as a result of competition is a good thing,
might make sense when interrogated through a purely theoretical economistic
lens, but is utterly inadequate when this perspective is juxtaposed with the
very real exploitative history of state and corporate power. Put briefly,
socio-economic inequalities in the world have emerged not only because of
economic reasons; they are as much the products of those cultural attitudes
that have tried to reduce the complexity of the human experience to a narrow,
statist/capitalist consensus that sits well with the modernist impulse to
discipline and order. The same critique
needs to be applied to the pollyanna view of technology as a panacea for the
redressal of the world's problems, a view the people at MIT are well aware of.
Technology, if its primary purpose is to serve the interests of
commoditization, can only act as a divisive force. Unless the discordant voices
that make-up the cacophony of our world are respected, and allowed to
articulate alternative modernities, I’m afraid that instead of progressing, the
world may well end up regressing.
My argument here is not that we should
allow ourselves to slide into excessive relativism or the token acceptance of
diversity (as has unfortunately happened in many parts of the world). What I am arguing for is the recognition
that a “one size fits all” attitude has the effect of curbing the creative,
regenerative, and dare I say, human impulses of people. Discordant voices are everywhere, and
instead of viewing them as source of indiscipline, or primordial resistance (as
many policy makers are wont to do), I believe that such voices have to be
engaged, and respected. The articulation of alternative modernities is a
fundamental part of society as we know it. To treat such voices and attitudes
as a problem is at best escapist. The
success of McDonald's (and many such symbols of corporate power) is
inextricably entangled with those structures and institutions of modern life
that have ordered our social world to "manufacture consent" and
stifle dissent. These institutions, that we have uncritically come to accept as
a part of our shared landscape, such as the government, schools, the media,
etc, do have some practical value, but in their current configuration, are
entirely ill-equipped to redress the high levels of disenchantment, alienation,
and disempowerment that people feel. This is because they are being used,
despite claims to the contrary, to program and institutionalize, not engage and
liberate.
The McDonald's paradigm is among the worst available to us precisely because,
as Daniel's note points out, the reason for its success is that it offers
"a limited range of dishes as commodities that have the same look, taste
and quality everywhere." It is frightening to think that decision-makers
at the highest level are uncritically equating the depth and complexity of
learning processes with the practices associated with mass production, i.e.,
standardization, commodification, and capital accumulation.
As I write this from the United States,
a society that has turned commoditization into an art form, it is apparent to
me that at this point in the world's history, there is an urgent need to evolve
regenerative mechanisms that allow people to learn, work, and live freely. In my own work I try to identify those
social spaces where people create, share, or debate ideas of a political
nature. Such spaces, or “publics” as I
like to call them, exist in all kinds of nooks and crannies, many of which are
not considered viable sites of organizing or political regeneration. In this sense, these publics exercise
critical surveillance over the government as well their own social
constituencies, without being tied-down to the normative practices of modern
liberal democracy. This flexibility has allowed disempowered groups to subvert
the exploitative institutions of the liberal/capitalist order, and in such
situations, these “publics” have become the loci of resistance, and are
reincarnated as “counterpublics” that take-on the abuses of power. I mention
them here because the McDonaldization of education can only perpetuate the
abuses of power, and perhaps more pertinently, will always find itself at odds
with the potential for regenerative learning embedded in all of us. u
The
(Neo)Liberal Impasse in Public Education
Yusef
Progler, Multiworld Network, United Arab Emirates
<yusefustad@hotmail.com>
John Daniel seems to be advocating a
sort of supply-side system of schooling, in which "courseware" is
produced by academics and technocrats and then consumed by teachers and
students. Seeing teachers and students as consumers is not a new view, and in
many ways education in the emancipatory/technocratic liberal model has always
seen teachers and students as consumers of one or another system or curriculum.
The novelty here is that the neo-liberal business gurus have hijacked that
outlook into a more economist framework, and so Daniel illustrates an
interesting hybrid of (neo)liberal technocracy.
While the general surface message is
that teachers and students are passive, educational administrators and
technocrats are active, there is another, subtler, problem with the Daniel
plan. He sees courseware as the main site of knowledge exchange, not the human
relationships at the heart of true teaching and learning. Teachers and students
do not really have much of a role in this outlook, which is a severely
reductionist prospectus that squeezes virtually all the humanity out of
learning, by separating off teachers (as hidden producers, increasingly
underpaid laborers, the new sweat shop workers) from students (as hapless
consumers, in need of technocratically-mediated emancipation). In the end, the
system is not questioned, only the means of its administration. Daniel is
offering a loose managerial rule for schooling, typical of both liberal and
neo-liberal true believers.
Using a framework of commoditization
suggests business and profit, completely in line with the corporate bid to
siphon public services for private gain. At the same time, holding aloof the
open source movement implies some sort of socialized access to courseware. So
which is it, Mr. Daniel, or can we have both? Or are you leaving a loophole in
this liberal sounding game for the neo-liberals to leap in and rule? If that
happens, we may really see teachers reduced to data keying the prolific palaver
of the professorate — themselves elevated to superstar status by the same
corporate machine that positions everyone as consumers of iconic hot-shot
hero-profs, media savvy yet verbose.
Daniel suggests that courseware can be
translated and customized for local use. This is tragically oblivious to the
metaphorical basis of language and ignores that language "thinks" us
as much as we use it to think. Like other (neo)liberals, Daniel sees language
as transparent, not carrying meaning in itself, only transmitting meaning, a
conduit. This obscures the distinctions between what language denotes and
connotes, and it is completely naïve as to even the most pedestrian insights
from anthropology, linguistics, and psychology, or even commonsense wisdom, on
the topic of language in the construction of meaning. Besides that, translation
is often just a colonial tool to fool us all into thinking we are simply
getting "pure" knowledge, when in fact we are getting a particular
worldview embodied in the language and thought system used to construct that
knowledge in the first place.
The digital networks necessary to
administer and distribute Daniel's courseware menus themselves are selective of
what is and what is not knowledge, since that which cannot be effectively
digitized and packaged over networks will not make it into the chute. Maybe
that's a good thing, and maybe it isn't, but Daniel and the (neo)liberals
advocating information-age fantasies of boundless knowledge for humanity, are
redefining education as consumption, with a new rallying call: "The global
fast course shopping mall is at your fingertips" (just make sure not to
get any greasy fast food on your keypad). Such are the sad dreams of detached,
free-floating ghosts, drifting aloft in an illusory world of commodities,
computers and courseware, a cyber-purgatory from which they cannot escape, and
into which they wish to entice others in the name of "education for
all." u
For
more on the Multiworld Network, see www.multiworld.org.
<lisa_aubrey@hotmail.com>
The McDonaldization of Education for
All is not an anomaly. McDonaldization
fits squarely into the current global trend of nouveau neo-exploitation,
reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s satirical and sadly prophetic Brave New World.1 Adapted to the 21st century,
human beings, with advanced technological speed, are becoming more and more
quickly transformed into mere atomotons with robotic functions serving an
unholy, almighty, hegemonic power via their labor. The numbing of mental
faculties of individuals and communities who differ with this current, but yet
classic, modus operandi because they desire more just, creative, organic living
is imperative to the McDonaldization project.
The numbing effect of (mis)education ensures that there is no effective
resistance to this hegemon. Numbing, non-emotive, objective (mis)education is
part and parcel of creating a non-resistant climate around deepening
exploitation during this wave of globalization. Effectively brainwashed, we are welcoming this exploitation to
and of ourselves, as we are universally learning and teaching domination and conditioning as we have been taught to
do. The remuneration we receive, as proletariat and petty bourgeoisie, is mere
pittance compared to the profits and power of the global hegemon.
“McDonaldization” is but the latest,
and perhaps the most sexy lexicon used for prescribing and enforcing the
domination of Eurocentric epistemologies and axiologies in a so-called
“universal” education. This universal
education, which also purports to be multicultural and reflective of diversity,
is nothing but the classical homogenization of all other alternative views and
ways of living into the dominant mode.
More critically, the creation of this universal education mandates the destruction of local knowledge
systems and other ways of knowing.. The
French have called it “assimilation, other Europeans “civilization,” social
scientists, “behavioralism” and “rationality”, computer techies who prescribe
education via the net ”advanced technology,” all of us “globalization.” Did I
use past tense?
John Daniel of UNESCO suggests that the
commoditization of learning material can bring education to all by teachers and
institutions making their courseware and learning materials freely available on
the web to be translated and adapted for local use.2 Some key questions ring clear: What does Daniel mean by learning? Is it memorization and
regurgitation? Is it passive
acquisition without critical thinking? What does Daniel mean by education? Is the mastery of repetition of the ideas and interpretations of
phenomena of noted others? Who are the teachers and institutions who are to
make their “courseware and learning materials” available? Whose values are grounded in the courseware
and learning materials? Who deems those teachers and institutions worthy of
universalizing education? Will they be other “elite” schools like MIT? Will schools that teach the ideologies of
resistance of Malcolm X, Mahatma Gandhi, Steve Biko, Assata Shakur, Martin
Luther King, Fidel Castro, Thomas Sankara, Nelson Mandela be prescribed? How
many individuals and communities will have access to the web to engage this
courseware? Is Daniel’s assuming that
all individuals and communities have equal and free access to the technology
that will provide universal web education? Is Daniel aware of the ever widening
digital divide? More fundamentally, is Daniel aware of the thousands of
communities who still struggle for potable water? For these communities, water
may be a more basic need, prioritized much more highly than internet and web
access.
Moreover, is Daniel suggesting, that in
trans-literate translation, language has no social or political context? Is Daniel presuming that there is a
universiality of epistemology and axiology equally embraced, owned, shared, and
utilized by all people throughout the world reflecting all peoples
ontogologically on an even keel? Is
Daniel presuming that there is a value in knowledge when it has no practical
reference, relevance, and utility? Is
Daniel’s view of education “knowledge for knowledge sake”? Is Daniel suggesting
an education for freedom and choice for all through McDonaldization, or is what
he is suggesting a masters’ education for servants to learn to better serve
their masters?
To ask these questions is not to assume
that Daniel, as Assistant Director-General of Education of UNESCO, has not
thought profoundly about these issues or does not know the answers. Assuredly,
someone of his stature within an institution which pledges good global
governance is astutely aware of the probable outcomes of McDonaldizing
education. This problematique is intriguing. Daniel perhaps, is living in a
house with no windows inside the UN bureaucracy; and, in a resurgent
modernization thrust in this
increasingly conservative neo-liberal environment, he is merely thinking
of what is best for poor societies that have been trying to combat material
poverty for decades. At the same time,
within this magnanimous bureaucracy, Daniel either is not really listening or can
not really listen to voices of the many people he believes he is trying to
help.
Daniel’s views run in concert with
countless elites in governmental and non-governmental circles, who in their
benevolence, undemocratically make global development policy, which includes,
(mis)education policy, affecting all of us.
Their policy making is dictatorial, and appears not to have space for
reflective internal evaluation of its own methodology. Otherwise, how can they continue to make the
same faux pas, unless faux pas are really intentional
consequences? If so, then the
McDonaldization scheme is certainly diabolical, classic and conspiratorial. It
is yet another scheme to ensure that the poor stay poor, and the richer get
richer. In global divide terms, it
means that the Global South, with its servitude-style McDonalized education, is
yet to stay subservient to the Global North, while the latter cooks up yet more
altruistic schemes that keep the former in its dependent position.
For modernizationists, the fact that
McDonald’s brings manufacturing and industrialization (however small), fast food
and food choice (however unhealthy) is a sign of progress. Further, the fact that the McDonald’s model
brings mass commodified education (however sub-standard) is a sign of progress. Increased supply is what matters, not the on-the-ground realities. To
modernizationists, it does not matter how many local farmers lose markets,
harvests, animals, or do not re-coup capital inputs; nor does it matter how
many farmer workers lose their jobs; nor whether or not the local economy
plummets; nor whether or not McDonald’s food causes health problems. Moreover,
it does not matter if there is a local demand for the McDonaldization of food
and education or not. McDonald’s public relations and advertisements will
seduce, and its grand design of making profits for the benefit of the already
rich will prevail against local will. To modernizationists, the existence of
the foreign and the multinational is progress, and local people’s rejection of
these is not a sign of the
undesirability of McDonald’s, but instead their rejection in a sign of their
own backwardness and short-sightedness.
The former’s rationalizations and interpretations would run like this:
We tried to modernize and “develop” them; they just refused to develop themselves. They can’t even see the potential of foreign
investments and foreign firms in their county.
It’s because of their backwardness that they reject all modernity,
progress, and development.
In decrying slavery in all of its forms
after the US civil war and the passage of the Civil War Amendments in 1865,
1868, and 1870, African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass makes a
statement relevant to the nouveau neo-exploitation that the McDonaldization of
Education for All threatens today: “You and I and all of us had better wait and
see what new form this old monster will assume, in what new skin this old snake
will come forth.”3 Even a
snake shedding its skin finds it impossible to become a “Big Mac with Cheese.” u