The McDonaldization of Education: the rise of slow

Slow.  I love this word, and yet it tends to have many negative connotations  in education. Which is too bad because it’s the very philosophy we need to save our education system, and give kids the time and space necessary to grow into the thoughtful, articulate citizens we desperately need them t0 become.

The 20th Century is known for many things. It’s mass destruction. Statistics show we managed to destroy each other and plunder the planet at a rate unequal to any other time in history. At the same time, it was also a time of great exploration, innovation and technological advance. The exploration of space. The eradication of disabling and fatal diseases. Increased global awareness. Gaining at least some measure of equality for groups who are disenfranchised.

However, the thing that stands out most vividly is what Canadian journalist Carl Honore describes as “the cult of speed”.  Slow ways of life have largely disappeared. Many see them as ancient, naive, or largely impractical.  Instead, we live in an instant world, where most often if you ask someone how they are, the reply is busy, as if the response justifies one’s existence on the planet. Few people stop to ask if what we’re so busy doing is actually worth the energy we’re expending.

According to Honore, fast and slow “are shorthand for ways of being, or philosophies of life. Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity. It is about making real and meaningful connections with people — culture, work, food, everything.”

Unfortunately, our education system, at least in North America, has been deeply influenced by the “need for speed”, or what George Ritzer has termed “McDonaldization” — that is, “the process by which the principles of the fast food industry are coming to dominate more and more sectors of the world.

Ritzer outlines four characteristics of this mechanistic worldview: efficiency, predictability, calculability (quantifiable results) and control — or at least the illusion of control. In regards to education, McDonaldization attempts to wipe out any of the messiness or inefficiencies of learning. Instead, it attempts to reduce it to a commodity that can be packaged, marketed and sold. Rather than cultivating a deep, holistic love of learning that touches every aspect of a student’s life, learning has been reduced to an assembly line. In reality, we’ve imposed a mechanistic view of life onto how people learn, which is largely an organic process, and at a great cost.

Education continues to rapidly adopt short-cuts that reflect the dimensions of McDonaldization. Essentially, this imposition seeks the most efficient (read, easiest) way to get a student from kindergarten to grade 12 .  In an assembly line, things are homogenized as much as possible. In education we tend to see this in the assumption that the most important thing a group of kids have in common is the year they are born.

Efficiency has also the birthed the idea that teachers can be replaced by Khan Academy, and the ridiculous class sizes that many teachers now have to deal with. I don’t doubt that the Khan Academy can transmit information, but that’s assuming that the transition of information is the most important part of learning. Can it help to develop our children into thoughtful , ethical citizens, who critically evaluate, rather than being swayed by the flavour of the day? Does it create citizens, instead of consumers? When learning is treated as one more product to be consumed, a horrible disconnect occurs in our students. It becomes about the mark. It becomes about the diploma. It becomes about the end justifying a lot of terrible means.

And if a student is not quite ready to read when it’s introduced, if they’re “slow”, if they mess with the efficiency and control of the system, then they often pay the price for the rest of their lives. Kids are labelled as being not “academic”, as if being academic is the most important quality a child can possess. Creativity is quashed. Curiosity is quelled. It may also explain the huge amount of student disengagement we see in today’s classrooms.

Predictability causes the standardization of a curriculum, and the way it’s taught, with little or no regard for student interest, background or ethnicity. Every student must be able to display the same skill (or regurgitation of content knowledge) at the same time. However, it’s important to be able to calculate if any of this is making a difference, so a system of high stakes testing is introduced.

In some cases, test scores are up, whatever that means. But our students are also more stressed and disengaged from their learning. They can jump hoops, but most have little idea about what they’re passionate about. Of course, another caveat is that it’s not clear what the long term costs of all of these methods will be. What does it do to a child to spend 12 years stressed out by tests or not measuring up to an arbitrary standard usually created and advocated by someone who can’t pass “the test” themselves?

And of course, there must be a way to control those involved. Fear. Fear of losing one’s job. Fear of losing funding. Fear of embarrassing test results being published. Fear of one’s child not being able to get into college to get a “good” job. There’s an awful lot of fear in education today, and the truth is, we have no idea what the long term cost of this is either. We know in the short term, we lose a lot of new teachers in the first five years. We know that others quit early or need stress leave. We know that children are more heavily medicated now more than any other time in history. So how do we change all of this insanity?

Enter the slow movement

For awhile now, I’ve been researching and thinking deeply about the slow movement. The Slow Food movement is a grass roots movement that began in 1989 in Italy. Over the past 25 years, it has branched out to other areas of life that have been co-opted by speed & efficiency.

The Slow Food movement abdicates the industrial food conglomerates, and seeks to reconnect citizens to the richness of a common life with the neighbours who grow and prepare our food. The Slow movement is a call for intentionality, an awareness of our mutual interdependence with all people and all creation. And it seeks to root people in their community.

Slowness doesn’t require everything be done as slow as possible. Instead, it seeks to do things well & at the right speed.

So what does the Slow movement mean for education? It asks us to reimagine what it means to be a community of learners.  It requires us to admit to, and evaluate the organic, messiness of learning. It requires admitting that a large part of what is happening isn’t good for our children, our teachers, or our communities. Rather than a top down industrialized and homogenized assembly line of education, we need a grass roots development of education that takes into account what real learning looks like and what children really need.

Instead we need a reimaging of what learning can be: Slow Education. As Honore states, “We are doing a great disservice to our children by pushing them so hard to learn things earlier and earlier and by keeping them so busy. They need time and space to slow down, to play, to be children. Across the world, parents, politicians, adults in general are so anxious about children nowadays that we have become too interventionist and too impatient; we don’t allow them enough freedom. ”

The principles of the Slow Food movement are good, clean, and fair. I imagine the principles of the Slow Education movement as authentic, individualized, and formative.

Authentic education requires that learning not be based on worksheets, standardized tests, or the myriad of other terrible things we subject children to. Instead, it allows children of all ages to engage in real, meaningful work that matters to them and their community. Learning that gives them an authentic purpose and a role in society, other than consumer-in-training. It allows students to discover the everyday citizens in their community and how they are working to make it a better place. Furthermore, it empowers kids with the opportunity to identify and seek solutions to the problems in their community. As a consequence of these changes, it seeks to re-educate our communities to see students as authentic, active participants in community life. Authentic education is also an act of justice. It’s about allowing kids the chance to explore social issues and helping them become ethical citizens who speak out and make a difference.

Individualized. Enough homogeneity. Education must be responsive to the real needs of students. We need to shift to using content to teach skills, student interest and most importantly teaching kids how to learn. It needs to put the onus of learning on those who have the most at stake: students. It requires teachers to become co-learners, and let go of control. It requires districts to trust administrators, administrators to trust teachers, and teachers to trust students. It requires a great deal of conversation about what real learning is and why it matters. It allows kids to explore what matters to them, to build things that don’t work, and to figure out why. It requires them to form opinions and justify them based on solid evidence. And it requires adults who care and can speak carefully, and honestly into the lives of their students. Supporting all of this is a community that is deeply connected to the life of the school.

Finally, all learning should be formative. We talk a lot about formative and summative assessment. But I honestly wonder why we even have summative assessments? Bottom line? To give a mark. To give the test score. So kids can have marks for college. Marks should be abolished. I realize that’s a strong statement, but I have good reasons for saying so. In addition to being an arbitrary symbol that we’ve given an awful lot of power to, it means very little. What does 82 mean? Really. I’ve asked students that question. I’ve asked parents and other teachers, as well. No one really knows. Does it mean you don’t know 18% of the stuff? And which 18%. What if it’s the really important 18%?

I once broached the topic of abolishing marks with a senior administrator in my school division. The response was, “Do you know how big that is? Do you know how much work that would take?” Yep, I’ve probably briefly pondered it. So is the reason we don’t do what we know is best for our children because we don’t have the guts or because it’s too much work?

On the other hand, formative assessment allows kids to reflect on their learning. To figure out how to create better. Why something works. Why it doesn’t. What did they do well? Where can they improve? It allows for more failure and less judgement. It provides feedback that matters to students. It provides voice. And it allows me to know everyday what my students can do well and where they need to improve. I’ll take that over 82% any day.

If we slow down education, kids might learn less. Yep. But often less is more.  A slow education values understanding over covering content. I truly question how many students are learning anything now, other than how to do school, or that they’re not academic. Instead, we have the possibility of educating kids in a way that helps them to develop into people who are happy, healthy and humane.

So what is the bottom-line of the slow education movement?

✓ We abolish the busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, quantity-over-quality education environment that prevails today.

✓ We educate parents and communities about the risks of today’s current model, including the drawbacks of “edubusiness.”

 ✓ We create learning environments that are carefully crafted, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity and engaging.

✓ We develop curriculum that has greater depth than breadth.

✓ We make sure our curriculum takes into account local culture and celebrates the uniqueness of our local community.

✓ We don’t isolate skills development but let students grow their skills as they engage with important content.

✓ We construct learning environments that foster questioning, creativity and innovation, such as the maker movement and project/problem based learning.

✓ We find the courage to have serious discussions about abolishing standardized testing, classroom marks and grading, and the use of “birth year” as our primary criterion for sorting students.

✓ We lobby our governments for funds to assure true equality in education for all children.

✓ We discontinue the ranking of teachers and schools.

 ✓ We replace our egg-carton grades with flexible, personalized learning that takes into account when students are ready to engage in and acquire important skills.

✓ We make time for teacher collaboration a top priority.

✓ We expect all classrooms to connect students globally so they can learn from others around the world and apply what they learn in their own communities through meaningful projects and service.

✓ We make student voice and choice an integral part of everyday teaching and learning.

It’s time for the rise of slow. It’s time for environments that nourish children’s minds, hearts and souls. To create spaces that allow kids to learn at their own pace, in their own way. Do I believe any of this is easy no. It will be real. It will be messy. It will be worth it.

Slow. For me the question isn’t who will let us; the question is who will stop us? It’s time to do what is best for students. It’s time to do what’s best for teachers. It’s time for a grass roots movement that comes together to change the tide. Are you ready?

 

Photo courtesy of flickr cc: Daniel Oines