Standardization Quotes

Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people. ~ H.L. Mencken

Individuality is either the mark of genius or the reverse. Mediocrity finds safety in standardization. ~ Frederick E. Crane

On observing 1963 America for the first time, the author says that organization and standardization to a certain degree compete with divine providence. ~ Karl Barth

Standardized personalization=universal right to meaningful learning. Personalized standardization=flexible access to mandated learning. ~ Andy Hargreaves

Alfred North Whitehead summed it up best when he remarked that the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the idea of invention itself. We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers - that is to say, as markets. ~ Neil Postman

Only functioning as a whole brain, IT can strike the right balance between stability and agility; creativity and standardization; innovation and risk intelligence. ~ Pearl Zhu

The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it's beginning to happen. ~ Will Self

When they say accountability, they mean surveillance and standardization. ~ Marc Lamont Hill

4. Radicalism of forms. If a new model once created meets with much success on account of its greater efficiency than its predecessor, it lends certain neighbouring forms a formal radicalism, which attempts to borrow from the appearance of the new form: for example, bronze tools that had reached the furthest development of their utility had a disastrous influence on stone tools, warping them toward an elegance that could only be attained in bronze. Today aviation has imposed its aerodynamic forms even on baby strollers and irons. This radicalism of forms is a result of the fact that people become bored when they do not find some unexpected element in the familiar. This radicalism might seem illogical, as the advocates of standardization believe, but we must not forget that discovery is only made possible by this need of humanity. ~ Tom McDonough

Regimentation, methodization, systematization, standardization, organization, coordination, disciplined arrangements, conformity
these things are at the very heart of our national state policies, and are the poison that has killed our families and left individual survivors in a numbed, angry, nearly hysterical condition. ~ John Taylor Gatto

Our goal should be minimum standardization of human behavior. ~ Douglas McGregor

It is of course no secret to contemporary philosophers and psychologists that man himself is changing in our violent century, under the influence, of course, not only of war and revolution, but also of practically everything else that lays claim to being "modern" and "progressive." We have already cited the most striking forms of Nihilist Vitalism, whose cumulative effect has been to uproot, disintegrate, and "mobilize" the individual, to substitute for his normal stability and rootedness a senseless quest for power and movement, and to replace normal human feeling by a nervous excitability. The work of Nihilist Realism, in practice as in theory, has been parallel and complementary to that of Vitalism: a work of standardization, specialization, simplification, mechanization, dehumanization; its effect has been to "reduce" the individual to the most "Primitive" and basic level, to make him in fact the slave of his environment, the perfect workman in Lenin's worldwide "factory. ~ Seraphim Rose

Latin, as we all know, ultimately broke down into Spanish, Italian, French, and so on. One wonders whether there will be an imperial parallel with English breaking down into, shall we say, North American, European, Australian, and so on. On the other hand, there is this immense, inward-driving influence of radio and television that is bringing us all back together. One could say it's a fight between the two: a fight between regionalism and the standardization through communication. ~ William Golding

So far, we do not seem appalled at the prospect of exactly the same kind of education being applied to all the school children from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but there is an uneasiness in the air, a realization that the individual is growing less easy to find; an idea, perhaps, of what standardization might become when the units are not machines, but human beings. ~ Edith Hamilton

We need standards with flexibility, not standardization with force if we are to get the best from our teachers. ~ Andy Hargreaves

I think standardization is really the first step to something being commodified. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Most of us are still in some small way victims of the Industrial Revolution. Whether through our grandparents, our parents, or our own experience, we were raised to believe that our place in life required compliance and conformity rather than creativity and uniqueness. We have been raised in a world where information is deemed far more important than imagination. Adults replaced dreams with discipline when they were finally ready to grow up and be responsible for their lives. Whether this contrast was reinforced on an assembly line, in a cubicle, or in a classroom, the surest path to acceptance in society is accepting standardization. And we more than willingly, relinquish our uniqueness. ~ Erwin Raphael McManus

If you think of standardization as the best that you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow; you get somewhere. ~ Henry Ford

There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying dissipating universe that we can help our children to avoid by providing them with 'explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly'. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity. ~ Arnold Toynbee

Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals. ~ Ida Tarbell

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality. ~ Erich Fromm

Industrial agriculture, because it depends on standardization, has bombarded us with the message that all pork is pork, all chicken is chicken, eggs eggs, even though we all know that can't really be true. ~ Joel Salatin

Standardization leads to rigidity, and rigidity causes things to break. ~ Bill James

Undoubtedly racist is the idea of unipolar globalization. It is based on the fact that Western, especially American, society equates its history and its values to universal law and artifcially tries to con- struct a global society based on these local and historically specific values – democracy, the market, parliamentarianism, capitalism, individualism, human rights, and unlimited technological development. These values are local, and globalization is trying to impose them onto all of humanity as something that is universal and taken for granted. This attempt implicitly argues that the values of all other peoples and cultures are imperfect, underdeveloped, and are subject to modernization and standardization based on the Western model.
Globalization is thus nothing more than a globally deployed model of Western European, or, rather, Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism, which is the purest manifestation of racist ideology. ~ Alexander Dugin

I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life. ~ Anais Nin

Give the child good books, then let it alone! Don't plough and harrow its brain, or stretch it on Procrustes-beds of standardization, simplification, and what not! ~ Laura E. Richards

The students who feel alienated by current systems of standardization and testing may walk out the door, and it's left to them and others to pay the price in unemployment benefits and other social programs. These problems are not accidental by-products of standardized education; they are a structural feature of these systems. They were designed to process people according to particular conceptions of talent and economic need and were bound to produce winners and losers in just those terms. And they do. Many of these "externalities" could be avoided if education genuinely gave all students the same opportunities to explore their real capabilities and create their best lives. ~ Ken Robinson

The problem with all of this, as historians advise us, is that the institutionalization of the systems that produce the values upon which a civilization depends, ultimately bring about the destruction of that civilization. Arnold Toynbee observed that a civilization begins to break down when there is "a loss of creative power in the souls of creative individuals," and, in time, the "differentiation and diversity" that characterized a dynamic civilization, is replaced by "a tendency towards standardization and uniformity." The emergence of a "universal state," and increased militarism, represent later stages in the disintegration of a civilization. ~ Butler Shaffer

India ... was like an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously ... Though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety among our people, everywhere there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages ... [India] was a world in itself, a culture and a civilization which gave shape to all things. Foreign influences poured in ... and were absorbed. Disruptive tendencies gave rise immediately to an attempt to find a synthesis. Some kind of a dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization. That unity was not conceived as something imposed from outside, a standardization of externals or even of beliefs. It was something deeper and, within its fold, the widest tolerance of belief and custom was practiced and every variety acknowledged and even encouraged. ~ Shashi Tharoor

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption. ~ Arthur Erickson

The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. ~ Julius Evola

In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now ? ~ Dana Gioia

Five coordinating mechanisms seem to explain the fundamental ways in which organizations coordinate their work: mutual adjustment, direct supervision, standardization of work processes, standardization of work outputs, and standardization of worker skills. ~ Henry Mintzberg

Yet, standardization only leads to sameness, not necessarily quality, and rarely to excellence (p. 9). ~ Thomas Newkirk

But when we become aware of how the school system is a conditioning agent to instill in children obedience to authority, passivity, and tolerance to tedium for the sake of external rewards, we begin to question school performance as a metric of well-being. Maybe a healthy child is one who resists schooling and standardization, not one who excels at it. Then I ~ Charles Eisenstein

The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy. ~ Alvin Toffler

Standardization is indeed the fundamental principle of desperation: when no other solution appears possible, simply design everything the same way, so people only have to learn once. If ~ Donald A. Norman

My evanescent anarchistic tendencies are purely classical. I use the word anarchist in the sense in which it was understood by the ancient Greeks. They, of course, accepted the anarchist as a fairly respectable--if somewhat vehement--opponent of government encroachment on the individual's rights to think and act freely. It is in this sense that I glimpse myself as an anarchist--regretting the growth of government and the ever-increasing trend toward regulation and, worst of all, standardization of human activity. ~ J. Paul Getty

The best-known definition of usability is the one from ISO, the International Organization for Standardization (9241-11): "The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use. ~ Carol Barnum

Can it be that the ultimate chapter of this new era of democratic freedom is going to be deformed by this growing drift toward conformity encouraged by politics and sentimental education? If so then by what name shall our national American character be justly called? Doomed to beget only curiosities or monstrosities in art, architecture and religion by artists predominant chiefly by compliance with commercial expediency?
Machine standardization is apparently growing to mean little that is inspiring to the human spirit. We see the American workman himself becoming the prey of gangsterism made official. Everything as now professionalized, in time dies spiritually. Must the innate beauty of American life succumb or be destroyed? Can we save truth as beauty and beauty as truth in our country only if truth becomes the chief concern of our serious citizens and their artists, architects and men of religion, independent of established authority? ~ Frank Lloyd Wright