Bureaucracy and Education

            Seeking knowledge is an important task in life, as education becomes the building block of any field in life, from planting to architecture and so on. Not knowing about sociological theories and how does it shapes our understanding of life could block us from seeing things that lies beneath the word ‘education’ or educational institutes.

            Educational institutes usually work with the same guidelines. They all have rules; they’ll ask you what to do and what to prevent yourself from doing. Therefore, students or faculties are not the ones who put the guidelines for their actions in the campus; the one who has the ‘control’ is the dean, the owner of the university or someone who is responsible for the education in the country. Therefore, educational institutes tend to be utilitarian organizations that are classified also as bureaucratic. Students go to school, universities or any other educational institute in order to seek knowledge or gain a degree; hence educational institutes are utilitarian. Educational institute put guidelines and goals for achieving a higher rank of education and students graduating with a high degree in order to compete with other institutes and raise their honor, therefore they’ve a goal or value to achieve by having a certain control on the students, so it’s bureaucratic.

            But is educational institutes being bureaucratic and utilitarian is beneficial or helpless? From the point of view of society, guidelines set by educational institutes can cause social conflicts, as some rules might seem fair to one and unfair to another. For example plagiarism, as some people might get affected if someone copied their work without them knowing and at the end, the plagiarist and the victim of plagiarism will be responsible. However, from the point of view of the functionalist, rules and guidelines are necessarily for helping people to achieve a certain point as they put certain tasks with certain deadlines so that employees or students won’t delay their work and would learn this much in this time. But that also bring us back to the fact of being controlled by these guidelines that are set by someone in a higher statues, therefore, we cant satisfy both sides, education always have a functional purpose and a conflict.

            Not only the large educational institutes such as universities have rules and guidelines, however, even school nowadays provides student with a small book full of guidelines and rules to be followed. When I used to be in primary school or even secondary school, in Qatar schools never had a full book that tells you what to do and what to prevent from doing, but when I got to high school at the year 2007, guidelines and rules were filing life. Not only my high school “Al-Bayan” had a book full of guidelines, but also online courses, social and educational centers…etc. all had policies. Having such policies, didn’t allow me or any other person seeking knowledge to do what we actually want to do, as we all had to do this and that at that certain deadlines and if we didn’t do things the same why, we fail. Therefore, it’s not a choice to follow what it is giving to us if we want the knowledge or the degree; it’s a must or else, game over. 

            In someway or another, we can’t do everything we want to do without following anyone’s rules. There is always someone who leads us around. Can be negative, but also positive, as if we break all the rules and we did whatever we wish, we lose organization in life as well as everyone will have his/her own revolution. 

McDonaldization in Your Homes!

As soon as you walk into someone’s house you could automatically get a sense of the culture. Some houses even have a particular smell that could identify where the residents are from. Walking into my friend’s house I mindlessly recognized the scent I smell in all Sudanese houses I enter. This is actually the scent of some products they use in the house that are shipped in to Qatar from Sudan. The next thing I notice is the color and brightness of the house. It’s usually white and more blunt than my house for example, which gives their space a more temporary feel. A lot of the Sudanese houses I’ve been to use white lights, in contrast to mine, where we have warmer lighting.



You get a sense that the Sudanese residents don’t really consider this house in Qatar their home. Whereas for Palestinians, who constantly struggle to live in a subculture, try to make these houses their homes. When I say subculture, I mean a smaller culture within another culture that Palestinian usually live in. Palestinians use warmer colors, a lot of carpets and really design their houses in a way to make it feel like a home to them. In my home, and a lot of Palestinian homes I’ve visited, we try to add a lot of Palestinian elements to the house as a reminder of that place we “belong to,” even if we didn’t buy these objects from Palestine.




Sudanese usually have a lot of African and tribal objects around their “temporary” house that are bought back from home, to remind them of that place that they will eventually go back to, their real home.






However, the households did have some things in common. To begin with, there was a feel of alienation, which could be defined as a state-of-being where human life is dominated by the forces of its own inventions. The houses were machine-dominated. The families weren’t connecting in conversation, but most of the family members were watching TV. While the teenagers or working children were on their laptops, connected to the Internet. Some of the younger children were playing video games.




When the mother or housemaid cooked or even made tea, they would use a kettle, microwave, gas-run oven and so on. Everyone in the house was using a machine. Some of the siblings even communicated through the use of their cell phones, instead of verbal communication. So, even if the culture is different or the dialect they use is different, whether you’re Sudanese or Palestinian you are influenced by this idea of “McDonaldization.” In sociology, McDonaldization is a process where society is increasingly run like a fast-food restaurant. This means that we’re all being influenced by the idea of rationalization and even households could be modernized some way or another. This definitely can’t sound very literal, where a household could never really be a McDonald’s. However, all homes try to be as efficient, predictable and controlled as possible. They have a set of rules to be followed, try to be as efficient as possible with time, money etc. and predictable with honesty and the open relationship everyone has with one another. With time, the children in the house and the parents start demanding more. Here, control and calculation come in, where they need to monitor the amount of things they buy and consume.