EDUCATION AS A COMPLEX SOCIAL SYSTEM

Present view about how education operates within a modern society is seriously deficient. In this report, the contemporary approaches to systems theory, entropy and autopoetic theory, social system theory, sociocybernetics, the strengths and limitations of these approaches, and their potential applications in education are examined. The nature of educational systems can be linked to biological concepts. When education principles and cybernetics are combined, the resulting theory turns on scientific principles instead of philosophical speculations. In order to build a bridge between the biological world of organic struggles for survival and the social world, a simplified explanation of the evolutionary process is presented. This is necessary to illustrate how survival inspires a cybernetic process leading to the evolution of educational systems.