Lost in the cage of McDonaldization

During my primary school years in Qatar, I was taught how to write the alphabets and for entire weeks at a time we wrote the alphabets, on sheets after sheets of paper, many hundred times as class work and homework. Years later as a young girl out of secondary school and as an assistant teacher at one of Qatar Academy’s Kindergarten classes, we had an “apple party” during the first few weeks of classes in order to teach the alphabet A. The children did not have much work at all, other than to write the alphabet A exactly one time on a sheet of paper then color it in rainbow colors or draw their family around it.

 M.E.S. Indian School, the one I studied at for 12 years, is the largest expatriate school in Qatar with a student body of more than 10,000 and increasing every year. A typical day at school for me for 12 years was: Get on a bus, go to school, do exactly as the teacher says, write down exactly what’s written on the black board or as dictated by the teacher by mouth, and then go home learn the written piece by heart like a machine and then produce it during the “monthly tests.” Each year there was a set syllabus for every class, from the headquarters of Central Board of Education India, for the students in Qatar. We were increasingly run like a fast food restaurant where we knew what to expect at each level of class. Thinking of it now I realize the pros and cons of how “McDonaldized” we were and how calculated and controlled our education had become.

 

The benefits of this system was: we were studying so much (so much!) in such less time, mostly by memorizing thing due to fear of not getting work done on time and we had the highest grades compared to many other schools in Qatar, with photos of top-score students appearing every year in the local Gulf Times or Peninsula newspapers. Within the downside of this system, by the time I graduated from secondary school there was no option left for me to join high school.

 

MES School

 
Qatar Academy

I sat in the principal’s office for an hour discussing why I couldn’t enroll in the Humanities options besides Engineering, Biology or IT. “Well, Dona you have great grades in Science and Mathematics. Why don’t you enroll in engineering or Science? Your sister is a top engineering student and an asset of our school.” I couldn’t tell him that I had passed all my classes by memorizing things forever and I had absolutely no interest in these subjects. Instead, I told him I was interested in Humanities and Arts and had a passion in this area. He asked me to wait a few months and if there were several students asking for the same option, I could enroll in Humanities. I waited a year, skipped high school and became an assistant teacher, before joining University. All of my classmates from MES are today Engineers, Doctors, housewives or working in large IT firms. We were trained from Day 1 with an “iron rod” in this particular direction.