McEducation: When the Curriculum Turns Teachers and Schools into Fast-Food Franchises

The word ‘education’ typically conjures images of classrooms, teachers, textbooks, and a learning process that helps individuals understand the world. Education is often understood as a nurturing space that allows every learner to develop according to their own potential, interests, and life experiences. However, amidst various curriculum changes and the demands of modernisation, a rarely asked question emerges: is school still a space for human growth, or is it slowly transforming into a production system operating on industrial logic?

This question may sound excessive. Yet, observing various educational policies in recent years, one can see an interesting trend. Schools are increasingly filled with achievement targets, performance indicators, assessments, digital reports, and various measures of success that must be met within a specific timeframe. Teachers are required to ensure all competencies are fulfilled, while learners are directed to achieve predetermined standards. Education is no longer just about the learning process, but also about efficiency, measurement, and target achievement.

This phenomenon can be interpreted through the concept of McDonaldization introduced by sociologist George Ritzer. In his book The McDonaldization of Society, Ritzer explains that modern institutions are increasingly organised based on four main principles: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. Initially used to explain the success of fast-food restaurants, this logic has since permeated almost all aspects of social life, including education. When these principles begin to dominate schools, what can be termed ‘McEducation’ is born.

One reason fast-food restaurants have expanded globally is their ability to produce uniform products. A customer ordering a specific menu will have a relatively identical experience regardless of location. Uniformity is considered important because it makes quality easier to control and evaluate. A similar logic is increasingly visible in education. The national curriculum is designed so that all learners achieve specific competencies. Schools in city centres and remote areas alike are directed towards similar standards. Teachers with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and teaching characters must still operate within the framework of predetermined learning outcomes.

Standardisation is not entirely wrong. The state needs standards to ensure equitable education quality. The problem arises when standards no longer function as guidelines but become the primary goal of education. Schools become busier ensuring all indicators are met rather than questioning whether the learning process is truly meaningful for students. At this point, schools begin to resemble knowledge franchises. Each school may have a different name, building, and environment, but they are required to produce relatively identical outputs. Education, which should value diversity, risks being trapped in a culture of uniformity.

The principle of efficiency, a hallmark of McDonaldization, is also increasingly apparent in daily educational practice. In the industrial world, efficiency means finding the fastest way to achieve the desired result. In education, this logic is visible through the growing orientation towards targets, outcomes, and various procedures that must be fulfilled. Teachers today do not just teach. They must also ensure all teaching apparatus is available, learning outcomes are documented, and various reports are compiled according to the system’s needs. In recent years, the government has pushed for the digitalisation of education through various platforms aimed at improving the quality of educational services. While this brings benefits in terms of information access and data management, it simultaneously ties education more closely to a culture of systematic measurement and surveillance.

Consequently, a teacher’s success is more easily recognised through data and documents than through the pedagogical relationships built with learners. The ability to understand a student’s psychological condition, foster self-confidence, build character, or help learners discover their identity are crucial parts of education that are difficult to translate into numbers or administrative reports. The more rationally the education system operates, the greater the risk of diminishing the human dimension in the learning process. Teachers risk transforming from educators into system operators whose main task is ensuring all procedures run according to standard.

A similar trend is seen in how education assesses learner success. In Ritzer’s concept, this is called calculability, the tendency to measure quality through numbers and quantitative indicators. In education, this symptom appears through the immense attention given to assessment results, exam scores, achievement indices, and other forms of measurement. Every time the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results are announced, public discussion almost always focuses on Indonesia’s position in the global rankings. Such data is indeed important for evaluating education policy. The problem arises when the quality of education is understood solely through scores and rankings.

Critical thinking skills, social empathy, environmental awareness, the courage to express opinions, the ability to cooperate, and sensitivity to social issues are all essential dimensions of education that are difficult to capture through standardised tests. When calculability becomes the dominant logic, these aspects are at risk of being marginalised simply because they are not easily measured.