Thread by @conways_law

On the importance of systems thinking in education (and a lot of other things)

This is an open letter to my granddaughter Sarah’s sixth-grade science teacher, continuing our conversation about systems thinking. If you care about the importance of education please read it.
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I hope you enjoy watching Russ Ackoff in action:


What I intend to discuss here is a step toward realizing Ackoff’s message. I believe that systems thinking is not just another curriculum topic.
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Rather, systems thinking has the potential to cause a major revision of primary and secondary education, even including the social studies. The purpose of this revision is to enlarge the way people think about their world.
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Below is a broad outline of a systems-thinking curriculum. I haven’t thought through how much time it should take, but one thing I know is that it should be integrated into the whole curriculum and not taught as a separate topic.
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Indeed, the way we have stovepiped education into “disciplines” is itself a sign of the absence of systems thinking in education strategy. That absence has inflicted a price we all pay on the way we think about our world.
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The practices of education and medicine have traditionally been organized in accordance with the associational preferences of its producers, not the needs of its consumers. This fact is a demonstration of the general applicability of Conway’s Law.
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The organizing concept of this educational design is Emergents. (I have searched for a simple one-word noun for “emergent phenomenon” and I haven’t found one yet. The best candidate I’ve seen is the word “emergent” used as a noun. So that’s what I’m going to use here.)
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I see a three-part sequence.

1. Emergents are interesting and sometimes surprising things. Here are a lot of examples.

I have in mind showing videos of emergent behaviors that could elicit discussion, for example, starling murmurations ()...
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...and schools of fish; backwards waves in traffic, indeed all mechanical wave phenomena; phase transitions, particularly freezing of water; etc etc.
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Here’s another example that I just realized decades after my experience in choruses of two major symphony orchestras. The purpose of rehearsals is not to train the singers--they know their parts--the purpose of rehearsals is to train the *ensemble*. The audience can tell.
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2. Now that we are familiar with emergents, let’s look at how they work.

(This model is aligned with laboratory-based science. It follows the approach of proposing a model, testing the model experimentally, and revising it on the basis of the experiments.
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I have a vision of a student-centered simulation-building platform that has the engagement power of a video game and the computing chops of a general-purpose simulator. It will be the basis of laboratory experiments.
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I imagine a simple, graphical, student-appropriate simulation-building language running on low-cost, readily available hardware that will be able to test the models of all of the examples being studied.
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I took particular encouragement when Google introduced Stadia (store.google.com/product/stadia), which, I understand, will run high-quality video games on many existing platforms, including Chromebooks.
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Industry observers (e.g., @ballmatthew) are evaluating the Stadia introduction solely in terms of its role in the gaming industry en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_gam…, but
>> I see @GoogleStadia as a disruptor of education.)
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One big idea that must be explored experimentally is local coupling: how local interactions produce emergent phenomena. For example, there is research showing that the emergent phenomenon of starling murmuration can be explained by local coupling npr.org/sections/13.7/….
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3. Surprise! Every phenomenon in your experience is an emergent.
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Here is a teaching opportunity to start with the atomic nucleus and proceed up through the Bohr model of the atom, the periodic table, and chemistry all the way up to world government, even proceeding on to cosmology, and connect them all with systems thinking.
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(I am working on a simple generic visual model that shows how the levels can be connected, one adjacent pair at a time.)
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Here is a useful mental exercise. In order to understand a Thing T1: Find a (note: “a”, not “the”) relevant enclosing System S of which thing T1 is a part. Then shift your focus away from T1 to that System S.
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In S, identify all the other Things (T2, T3, etc) in System S that interact with each other, and describe these Interactions I1, I2, etc. among the Things T1, T2, T3, etc.
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Then explore the different ways this System S might behave as the configurations of T’s and I’s are varied.

Now reflect on the fact that every S is somebody else’s T, and every T is somebody else’s S.
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The purpose of this exercise is to help one think one level up from the way we are taught to think now, and consequently to see emergents as perfectly natural, in fact ubiquitous, phenomena in our world.
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The purpose of this curriculum design is to change the way we examine our world. The basic lesson: If emergents are not obvious at first glance, then it’s our job to find them. If we haven’t done that our examination is incomplete.
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