The values, attitudes, and biases inherent in the instructional paradigm are predicated upon an industrial model of human learning. This factory model of education values quality control, which is ironic since higher education is currently under such intense scrutiny to be accountable for the quality of graduates. Concern over the business/factory influence on higher education is certainly not new. John Jay Chapman wrote in 1909, “The men who stand for education and scholarship have ideals of business men. . . . They are, in truth, business men. The men who control [universities] today are very little else than businessmen running a large department store which dispenses education to the millions” (quoted in Lucas, 1994, p. 192). Most of the critics of the growing bureaucracy in higher education admitted that it could not be eliminated, but still decried its current form which had a tendency to “dehumanize collegiate life” (Lucas, 1994 p. 193). A more recent criticism in a report issued by the American Association of University Professors (2008) placed the factory analogy in contemporary perspective as U.S. colleges and universities “are embracing the operating strategies of for-profit corporations with growing fervor. . . . [C]olleges and universities increasingly conceptualize higher education as a commodity and attempt to provide it at the lowest cost. They do so by reorganizing themselves as ‘knowledge factories’ in which a variety of internal functions (for example, dining services and facilities maintenance) are outsourced to for-profit contractors who pay their workers minimum wages and in which the central teaching and research functions are outsourced to legions of poorly paid nontenure-track adjunct faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students” . Similarly, Dolence and Norris (1995) described the transition from the industrial age to the information age, noting that the factory model that characterized education in the industrial age was insufficiently flexible and focused on outputs and processes rather than on learning.
In this factory model, students’ potential is determined by ACT, SAT, HSGPA, and sometimes other quantifiable measures. Depending upon our institutional standards, students are deemed to be the acceptable quality of raw material for our product. Quality control is especially evident in the freshman year, during which the weaker material is sorted out. The Wingspread Group on Higher Education (1993) charged that “Our education system is better organized to discourage students—to weed them out—than it is to cultivate and support our most important national resource, our people”. Students are directed to take a prescribed collection of courses in a prescribed sequence in order to assure quality control over the exiting product, our graduates. This model devalues the individual. In the mass production mentality that this model represents, students assimilate information at equivalent rates with equivalent responses, thus creating like products. This assembly line of education presupposes a sameness to individuals, so that regardless of prior learning, individual differences, or extracurricular experiences, each student following a like path will emerge from the assembly line like all the others.
In this factory model, students’ potential is determined by ACT, SAT, HSGPA, and sometimes other quantifiable measures. Depending upon our institutional standards, students are deemed to be the acceptable quality of raw material for our product. Quality control is especially evident in the freshman year, during which the weaker material is sorted out. The Wingspread Group on Higher Education (1993) charged that “Our education system is better organized to discourage students—to weed them out—than it is to cultivate and support our most important national resource, our people”. Students are directed to take a prescribed collection of courses in a prescribed sequence in order to assure quality control over the exiting product, our graduates. This model devalues the individual. In the mass production mentality that this model represents, students assimilate information at equivalent rates with equivalent responses, thus creating like products. This assembly line of education presupposes a sameness to individuals, so that regardless of prior learning, individual differences, or extracurricular experiences, each student following a like path will emerge from the assembly line like all the others.
