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If you look at some of the descriptors of a complex adaptive system, these are certainly not the descriptors of traditional, formal higher (or lower) education. Emergence, self-similarity, self-organization… doesn’t sound like the usual notion of college, does it? Indeed, it’s hard to conceptualize just how a complex adaptive systems model of education would be implemented at all. But perhaps that’s an indicator of failed thinking — must we think of education as something to be implemented? Or is it something that happens? Whatever the case, the authors argue it’s just such a system that is needed to support environments where learning by doing takes place and where engagement happens both inside and outside of a classroom.

education is an ecosystem, full of dynamically-connected multiple agents that move in a web of interactions that ultimately change the course of the system itself over time.

Our Santa Fe Institute and SRI Inc. research is attempting to model educational subsystem behaviors through the lens of complex adaptive systems to better conceptualize the current educational ecosystem.

The school is the main author of curricula. And the teacher is the sole authority monitoring the progress of students. In Finland, there is a strong sense of trust in schools and teachers to carry out these responsibilities. There is no external inspection of schools or standardized testing of all pupils in Finland. For our national analysis of educational performance, we rely on testing only a small sample of students.

in Finland, education is viewed primarily as a public effort serving a public purpose

Many elements of Finnish successful school system are interwoven in the surrounding welfare state. Simply a transfer of these solutions would add another chapter to already exhausting volume of failed education reforms.