Education, Complexity, Luhmann and Clarkson

We received the following letter from Jan Ritsema, after he had heard about The Three Ways of Getting Things Done. I’ve reproduced it in full because it raises further issues about education. (See also the blog on Triarchy Theory in Education). But it also provoked a Google run-around which I describe at the end.

I am working in France, in an old convent which I bought last year (www.pa-f.net our website under construction) on an educational experiment of which the principles of self organizing and self motorizing are essential. In order to do away with the highly repressive methods of the command and control types of teaching and the simple minded cause and effect principles.

I feel very much acquainted with Jacques Rancière (emeritus professor at Paris VIII) who wrote The Ignorant Schoolmaster.

By starting this educational experiment I want to create an example that "students", I prefer to call them "not-yet professionals, can teach themselves much more than is allowed to them now. This will prevent them being stupefied by the educational system. On the contrary it will enhance their general intelligence.

I am a theatre director and business man (publication and bookshop) but with strong deschooling and open source principles.

This year we made a theatre production in English partly on the changes coming from the possible Hydrogen Revolution called KNOWH2OW and the year before a dance production, called BLINDSPOT, partly based on Luhmann's Systems Theory.

I am 61. Dutch nationality. Living in Brussels and near Reims in France.

We seem to have quite something in common as far as our interests and visions concern.

I start all this in France without any financial support, but with the strong support of the international experimental contemporary performing arts community.

I try to connect to people with similar quests.

Hopefully we can have some contact in one way or another.

Best regards,

Jan Ritsema

I Googled Luhmann out of interest and found a fascinating item at http://www.geocities.com/~n4bz/lusoc/lusoc1.htm

I quote just one extract:

In addition to increasing variety the hierarchical structure of complex systems allows individual levels of the system to interact as though they were simple systems The ant, for example, is a highly complex organism. But as Simon explains. seen as behaving organism wending its way across the beach it is quite simple. When we are considering the problem of finding his way home the ant can be considered as a machine with one predominant property, an instinct for knowing the direction to its nest. Each obstacle, then becomes a single isolated event, a simple choice between often arbitrary outcomes The property which allows us to consider the ant in this manner is what Simon called "near-decomposability," which simply means that each level of a complex system has a limited amount of autonomy and within those limits can be considered a simple system with only that variety faced by this level to contend with. Luhmann frequently used the term "reduction of complexity" in his works. If we see that the mechanism he is referring to is this property of complexity of reducing the amount of variety a system is forced to contend with through hierarchical structure, we can overcome the redundancy in Luhmann's descriptions and at the same time open the door to more and deeper insights into social structure.

This perhaps provokes questions about the extent to which autonomy can exist in an organization and the necessity for hierarchy as a means reducing unwanted variability.

At the same time, my search for Luhmann took me via chaos and complexity to a paper by Professor Petruska Clarkson at the Society for Organizational Learning - which stresses, amongst many other things that:

organisations who are surviving and even thriving in the light of an increasingly unknowable future have had to become more open to disorientation, turbulence, confusion, conflict and unpredictable changes. Therefore, new knowledge, attitudes and competencies are now required and enacted.

Most people probably recognise these twin requirements: for flexibility to manage the unknowable and for systems to manage the stresses of flexibility. That’s the kind of double bind that Clarkson is equally comfortable writing about in a psychotherapeutic context: she happens to be one of the country’s foremost experts (and probably the best current writer) on Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy. But you may also know her as a sex and sexuality guru and author. Truly a Renaissance woman for the 21st century.