Davis and Sumara’s book about complexity theory in education, mentions the Santa Fe Institute, a center for complexity research, but I’d never heard of it. They also referred to a book by M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, which as it turns out, tells the story of the beginning of the Santa Fe Institute. So I’ve been reading, catching up on this chapter in the recent history of science.

It’s a good book for a non-technical reader. It’s written in journalistic style, like one of Tom Wolfe’s books, and it tells the story of Brian Arthur, an economist who wasn’t satisfied with conventional economic models that describe the marketplace as a stable equilibrium-seeking system. Arthur’s intuition was that markets don’t exist as a closed system, and that conventional models of the economy don’t accurately account for adaptive and irrational choices made by decision-making agents. Waldrop’s book reads like a hero’s quest, with Brian Arthur challenging the reductionist assumptions of modern science.

This interests me because I recognize the classroom as a complex system, also. And most of the education reform rhetoric is based on similar reductionist cause/effect assumptions as the ones that Brian Arthur challenged.

Tom Hoffman’s comment on a post of Bill Kerr’s got me thinking. Tom said:

One thing that drives me crazy about our favorite ed-tech K-12 Web 2.0 rhetoricians is the exclusion of modernity and modernism from the discourse. To get this right you have to understand modernity and then understand how new technology sits on top of it.

That comment connected with something I found in Waldrop’s book. There was a discussion between Arthur and Frank Hahn, in which Arthur remembers them thinking about the question of

“How do you deal with bounded rationality? That is, what would really happen to economic theory if they quit assuming that people could instantaneously compute their way to the solution of any economic problem (p. 250).”

Which sounds like what happens when we use standardized testing to drive education policy.

One thing about the internet, there is plenty of opportunity to gather background information. I’m no expert on modernism as an intellectual movement, but progress, reason, technology, and a new world order all seem to be bundled together in it. I’m reading more now to get a better handle on this:

Seriously, Hahn continued while Arthur tried to laugh, there is only one way to be perfectly rational, while there are an infinity of ways to be partially rational. So which way is correct for human beings? “Where,” he asked, do your set the dial of rationality? (p. 251)

The point here is that the classroom, like the economy, doesn’t always behave like a machine with direct causes and effects, but it does require some rational limits. What are they, and how should they be determined? Classroom dynamics come from impulsive and idiosyncratic behavior by everyone in the group to one another as well as to the structural limitations and possibilities presented by the system. What does this mean for the teacher, the researcher, the politician, or the ed-tech reformer?

The answer was suggested with Brian Arthur’s insight about the limits of rationality:

“Economics, as it is usually practiced, operates in a purely deductive mode….Every economic situation is first translated into a mathematical exercise, which the economic agents are supposed to solve by rigorous, analytical reasoning. But then here were Holland, the neural net people, and the other machine-learning theorists. And they were all talking about agents that operate in an inductive mode, in which they try to reason from fragmentary data to a useful internal model. Induction is what allows us to infer the existence of a cat from the glimpse of a tail vanishing around a corner. Induction is what allows us to walk through the zoo and classify some exotic feathered creature as a bird, even though we’ve never seen a scarlet-creseted cockatoo before,. Induction is what allows us to survive in a messy, unpredictable and often incomprehensible world.(p. 253)

There’s a zen spirit in teaching well that needs to be recognized.

Bill Kerr commented that my earlier post held a contradiction between the “twitch speed management” of RSS feeds, and slow deep thinking that some complex articles might demand. I liked the twitch speed characterization. And I see his point about the contradiction. It’s a messy, unpredictable, and often incomprehensible world. As it should be.