The Roots of Complexity Theory in John Dewey's The School and Society

• In Event: Education for Diverse Democracy: A Deweyan Complexity-Based Vision of Schools

Abstract

My presentation shows that the roots of complexity theory in education are already to be found in John Dewey’s School and Society. Studies of complexity and self-organization look for general principles about the growth and evolution of structure in systems, seeking to understand how changes in control parameters of the system affect components and their interactions. Principle control parameters include the number and diversity of interacting agents and strategies, the rate of flow of information circulating in the system, and the strength of interactions. Changes in these control parameters affect the stability of organizations and their parts, and can prompt phase transitions at the edge of chaos. It is a key principle of the pragmatics of complexity that it is possible to control phase transitions by manipulating control parameters even though the structure of the post-transition system is not predictable or capable of control.

The conventional classroom that Dewey critiques in School and Society affects control parameters to reduce complexity to assure control. The only significant actor is the teacher. The dominant strategy is the didactic method. All students are rendered passive – reduced to ‘listening.’ Their main task is to sit down and shut up, preventing any strong interactions – those likely to affect the subsequent behavior of the system. The only information is predigested materials in textbooks, worksheets, and lectures, and it circulates from teacher to learners only; it does not flow within the system.

Dewey asks us to conceive of a different kind of order, where learners are live creatures pursuing ends. The shift from “passive and inert recipiencey and restraint to buoyant outgoing energy is so obvious,” he says, “as to fairly strike one in the face” (p. 28). Each child is distinct and employs distinct strategies. Activity spaces (gardens, shops, theatres) are the centers of learning, not ‘classrooms.’ The library is the central source of information, not teachers. Teachers are primarily educational designers who organize activities to stimulate learners to engage with subject matters that stimulate them to act in pursuit of ends. Each learner will thus have unique and unpredictable information needs, and because the settings call for strong cooperative interaction (as in creating a garden or putting on a play), information will circulate rapidly. Thus Dewey sets the control parameters to create high levels of complexity. The teacher’s role during activity is to intervene at the edge of chaos to narrow ends and assist learners eventually to converge upon and achieve ends in view.

This new kind of order is achieved through self-organization. Order, Dewey says, is relative to purpose. If the purpose is to dictate school lessons tight control is needed. But if the purpose is to foster cooperative ends-directed activity, order must grow directly out of activity itself. There will be “the confusion, the bustle that results from activity.” But “out of doing things that are to produce results, and doing so in a social and cooperative way, is born a discipline of its own kind and type” (p. 31).

Author

• Leonard J. Waks, Temple University