A Liberal Artist Wanders Into The Realm Of Science, With Vexing Results

I took a class on systems theory in college that concentrated on the dynamic, unpredictable, chaotic aspects of systems. The worldviews of the philosophers and novelists whose work we read were endlessly exhilarating, if somewhat terrifying.

Articles I read in grad school last year (by David Cohen and by Stigler and Hiebert) present a very different theory of systems: Far from providing butterflies on power trips with quick and easy ways of causing natural disasters across the globe, huge sprawling systems (ecosystems, languages, education, bureaucracies) exert all their massive might to crush any potential disturbance almost before it appears. Systems are conservative to the extreme. This perspective, too, I find terrifying.

If systems overreact to and amplify change, caution is in order when attempting any kind of reform. Of course that does not seem to be the case, at least in the area I am thinking of, which is school reform. On the contrary, no reform seems big enough, no revolution absolute enough, in the world of progressive education. The education system, at least, appears to be conservative.

But does that assumption argue for more revolutionary reforms or more cautious ones? On one hand, it is going to take a lot to change a system so resistant to change, and we’d might as well start changing as much as we can as quickly as we can. On the other hand, because, as a professor once told me, progressive education is like a pork chop—better nonexistent than half-cooked—even the smallest changes could be very damaging in that they will clash with everything around them and possibly negate or at least fail to help other efforts, progressive or not, at good teaching and administration. By this logic, extreme caution would have to be prescribed.

So I feel paralyzed. We mustn’t be overzealous for fear of being counterproductive, but we must be overzealous if anything at all is to be accomplished. I suppose ideally we would all sit and think for a very long time until we had considered all possible contingencies and felt confident that our proposed reforms would have a radical but not negative effect—and then implement them. But history and society (not to mention human lifespans) do not allow for that. What options are left? Must we either reform the entire system at once or leave it be? Trial and error seems so unacceptable in a system in which (again, as a professor once said) each child is in fourth grade but once.