Charlie Munger thought McDonald's did a better job educating people than Harvard.

Well, McDonald’s may indeed be an excellent institution for teaching people how to arrive on time, follow procedures, serve customers, accept hierarchy and perform repetitive tasks reliably. Those are useful skills. But calling that “education” while comparing it with Harvard mixes two completely different functions.

Harvard’s purpose, at least in principle, is to teach people how to think, question assumptions, develop specialised knowledge and eventually make decisions that affect institutions. McDonald’s teaches people how to function inside an institution that has already made most of the decisions for them.

There is also an obvious conflict of interest worth remembering: Munger and Buffett were among the most sophisticated owners of businesses built on exactly this kind of organisational discipline, including McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. That doesn't make their observation false, but it should make us ask what they meant by “education.”

So what’s the take? Maybe Munger was accidentally describing exactly what capitalism actually needs from most people: not independent thinkers, but reliable operators who show up on time, follow the system, accept the hierarchy and execute low-information tasks without needing to understand who designed the system or why it works that way.

And if that is what Munger meant by “education”, then McDonald’s really might be one of America’s greatest educational institutions.