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As a country and perhaps even the
wider society we continue to grapple with issues around education and its role
in preparing the citizenry for optimal participation in society, maintaining and
progressing its existence, values and institutions.
Some of these value objectives
revolve around longevity, good health and dignity of humans as individuals and
as members of a larger collective. Human behaviour seemed to gain importance as
a key variable in the achievement of the above stated objectives, as people
realised that other peoples actions initially as individuals and later as
aggregated agents could affect others' existence, state of wellbeing, physical
and psychological states.
In our endeavour to deconstruct
what model behaviour and rules of existence protected the interests of the
majority we began to identify, study and analyse the impact of variables in the
environment and of individual –aggregated-environmental interactions. This subsequently got recognised as a
complex adaptive system.
While this produced information
around many subroutines that comprised actions influencing behaviour to
produce outcomes conducive to the final objectives of longevity, happiness
and sustainability of mankind, the perpetual novelty of the changes effected by
these actions constantly evolve these subroutines. Thus introducing uncertainty into the model for us to never be sure
about what to expect.
In order to ensure that our
future generations and others align to our understanding of near optimal
subroutines we aim to design education systems to support our objectives.
Ofcourse as individuals sit in different seats and experience our world and
interaction therein differently, we mostly hold divergent views of the world and
on what ideal education and optimal delivery methodologies for it are.
There is logically no basis for
us to agree on whose view is right or ideal as the boundary conditions for
those views and the variables within keep changing. Generally when the majority
agree and find favour within power structures to shape and move education into
a certain direction it moves, but never quite in a uniform way predictable across
time or for outcomes. Therefore a number of subroutines are always in play in varying degrees
of thrust and in different directions because of which a large scale
educational system set on standardization is self-defeating.
The very nature of complex
adaptive system and the attempt to define ideal education systems, objectives
and practices therein has had us uncover an ever-increasing array of dynamic variables
and their related dynamic interactions, causing us to get an ever increasing
complex view of it and therefore of education management. We hope to be able to identify subroutines that hold good for a period of time when
steady states or optima prevail or can be created therefore. This is to hopefully give ourselves a better chance to
adjust to subsequent changes by understanding the cause-effect of changes in
relevant variables and thus manage to keep the changes fairly aligned towards
achievement of objectives for as long as is possible. All this while being aware that
sand is slipping by through the hands all the time as our very efforts to
preserve the order are agents that are the cause of prevailing and ensuing chaos.
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