A system of public education inevitably rests on public consensus regarding the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that will be needed by future citizens. Today, I believe our traditional consensus regarding the goals and processes of public education leaves us dangerously vulnerable in a world of increasing interdependence. We have all been taught to break apart complex problems and fix the pieces. Our traditional education process — indeed, our theory of knowledge in the West — is based on reductionism, fragmenting complex phenomena into component parts and building up knowledge of the parts. Moreover, our traditional system is based on competition and individual learning.

This process starts in elementary school and continues through the university, getting worse and worse the further one “progresses” in higher education. Literally, to be an expert in our society is to know a lot about a little. Such an educational process can never lay a solid foundation for understanding interdependency and for fostering genuine dialogue that integrates diverse points of view.

Concern today with public education focuses on achievement relative to traditional standards. But the real problem lies with the relevance of the traditional standards themselves. Preparing citizens for the future with the skills of the past has always been the bane of public education. Today, it could be the tragedy of our times.

We are witnessing a massive breakdown of traditional institutions worldwide.

A Leading Edge Of Change

Given the profound changes unfolding around us, it is not surprising that we are witnessing a massive breakdown of traditional institutions worldwide. In a world of increasingly rapid change and growing interdependence, large, centrally controlled organizations have become virtually ungovernable. The Soviet Union, General Motors, and IBM, one-time paragons of power and control, all suffered massive breakdowns in the 1980s.The fundamental problem became the management system itself — the inability to effectively coordinate and adapt in an increasingly dynamic world, to push decision-making to the “front lines,” and to break up power blocks committed to self-interest over common interest.

The breakdown in our traditional system of management is driving extraordinary change in large business enterprises. In fact, no institution has been forced to confront the changes of an interdependent world more rapidly than business. Because businesses compete against one another around the world, if one company or one part of the world makes significant headway in developing new skills and capabilities for a dynamic, interdependent world, it will quickly gain advantage. Others will have to play catch-up or go out of business.

The basic problem is that it takes years to develop the skills and knowledge to understand complex human systems, to learn how to think and learn together across cultural boundaries, to reverse years of conditioning in authoritarian organizations where everyone looks “upward” for direction instead of “sideways” to see the larger systems of which one is a part. Equally challenging, it takes patience, perseverance, and extraordinary commitment to develop these skills and understandings in the context of corporate environments still largely dominated by authoritarian, control-oriented cultures.

A Lagging Edge Of Change

The more one understands the skills, knowledge, and beliefs needed to succeed in an increasingly interdependent world, the more one sees that it is folly to focus exclusively on our “system of management” and ignore our “system of education.” Isn’t it silly to begin developing systems thinking capabilities in 35-year-olds who have spent the preceding 30 years becoming master reductionists? Isn’t it grossly inefficient to begin developing reflectiveness, the ability to recognize and question one’s own mental models, with adults who, in order to be successful in school and work, had to become masters at solving problems rather than thinking about the thinking that generated the problems? Isn’t it naive to think that we can suddenly master collaborative learning as adults, when so much of our lives has been devoted to win-lose competition and proving that we are better than each other? Shouldn’t personal mastery, the discipline of fostering personal vision and working with creative tension, be a cornerstone of schooling? Isn’t it hypocritical to espouse personal vision and self-assessment when so much of traditional schooling is devoted to learning what someone else says we should learn and then convincing them we’ve learned it?

Increasingly, business people are beginning to recognize the tragic neglect of fundamental innovation in public education. And they are moving from financial contributions to action. Electronic Data Systems allows employees to take time off to volunteer in public schools. Intel employees have worked to start new public schools in Arizona and in statewide educational reform movements in Oregon and New Mexico. Ford employees are teaching systems thinking and mental models in community colleges in Detroit. Motorola has started its own summer camp, teaching employees’ children basic science and technology.

But, little is likely to take hold and grow from such isolated experiments until there is a widespread revolution in professional and public thinking about the nature and goals of public education. How will we need to expand the traditional skillset of the industrial era for the knowledge era? How must our traditional ideas about school give way as more and more of the content of traditional education becomes available over the Internet? What will educational institutions in the knowledge era look like?

There are no easy answers to such questions. My guess is that two cornerstones of the new system of education will be recognizing the importance of the learning process in addition to the content of what is learned, and making high-level thinking and learning skills, like systems thinking and collaborative learning, as central as the traditional skills of reductionist thinking and individual problem-solving. These could be two elements of a thought revolution in education.

Who Will Lead The Transformation?

Several years ago, my wife and I attended an awards assembly at our teenage son’s school. Our five-year-old son, Ian, was with us. When the winner of the first award was announced, Ian turned to Diane and asked, “Mommy, is only one child getting an award? What about the others?”

What did a young child see that sophisticated educators overlook?

Why can he see the system as a whole — all the students — and the educators see only the pieces, the “exceptional” kid? Maybe it’s simply that the professional educators have spent their whole lives in school. Maybe, despite their knowledge about learning theory and research, they have a hard time seeing beyond “the way it’s always been done.” Maybe we all need to be leaders for change.

In 1995, I participated in a series of satellite broadcasts on learning organizations sponsored by the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development and the PBS Satellite Network. One of these shows involved three students from the Orange Grove Middle School in Tucson, Arizona, which had been integrating systems thinking and learning-directed learning throughout its curriculum and management practices for over five years. The clarity, articulateness, and composure of these young people impressed the other participants, mostly corporate managers doing the same kind of work within their businesses. As the program went on, many of the most penetrating insights were offered by the young people. When the moderator asked for any closing remarks, Kristi Jipson, an eighth-grade student at Orange Grove, said, “. . . We are really excited about what we are learning now. Before, you only needed to learn the ‘book and ruler’ stuff. But now, as this program shows, businesses are changing and, by the time we get there, this is what will be going on, and we’ll need to know it.”

Interestingly, one of the more forceful voices for innovation in the Catalina Foothills District, where Orange Grove is located, has been a group of senior “citizen champions,” many in their 70s and older. They formed The Ideals Foundation, with a vision of developing entire curricula organized around “demonstrating how the parts relate to the whole.”

These examples demonstrate that the profound rethinking of public education required today cannot be led by any one constituency or professional group. The future is the responsibility of us all. And “all” includes those who have seen the most of the past and those who will see the most of the future. All must participate and all must lead.

Excerpted from the Preface to Envisioning Process as Content, edited by Arthur L. Costa and Rosemarie M. Liebmann. Copyright © 1997 by Corwin Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Corwin Press, Inc.

Peter M. Senge, best-selling author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, is an international leader in the area of creating learning organizations. He is a senior lecturer in the Organizational Learning and Change Group at MIT and chairman of The Society for Organizational Learning (SOL). Peter has lectured through- out the world and written extensively on systems thinking, institutional learning, and leadership.

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It was going well—on average, each family and business was using less water. But one day I received a letter from an environmental activist:, “Dear Mr. Jones, you are making things worse!” he wrote. He acknowledged the improvements in efficiency, but asked us to look at the effects on rivers and aquifers, where total withdrawals had actually gone up. Our programs had helped people be more efficient, so something else was going on, but what? The writer argued that population in the area was growing, and that we were helping to drive the boom.

Consider how things worked in a desert city like Tucson before water efficiency improvements. What was the main limit to population growth? Water. So after the water-efficiency programs helped people and local businesses use less water, developers were able to build more houses. Growth in population wasn’t just an external force over which city officials and environmentalists had no control; it was something that we were helping to spur. So, as the letter writer said, our efforts didn’t bring any improvements in rivers and aquifers.

It didn’t stop there. The writer argued that when people and businesses are inefficient in their use of water and a drought occurs, they can cut back on their water use to make up for the lack of rainfall—shorter showers, less lawn watering, and so on. But in a high–efficiency setting, that kind of buffer doesn’t exist anymore. During a drought, the city makes up for the shortfall by taking water from rivers and aquifers. Nature carries the extra load, not the old buffer of wasted water (see “How the System Actually Behaved”). Ouch! At best, we didn’t help much. At worst, we hurt this system. What was going on?

MY MENTAL MODEL

My vision of how to keep more water in rivers and aquifers involved promoting conservation efforts such as water-saving toilets and showerheads. But this linear approach failed to take into consideration the system’s interconnections.

As preservationist John Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” This story of increasing water efficiency is an example of an approach to change that goes back 3,000 years.

Reductionist View

We can trace the reductionist view back to around 500 B. C., when the Greek philosopher, Parmenides, made the case that the universe is composed of divisible parts. Flash forward to Newton and Descartes in 1700s and 1800s, describing the universe as a collection of separate, distinct parts that all fit together like a big, orderly clock. This kind of thinking served us just fine in many ways. And yet at some level, it has led us to think of our world as unconnected, so, for example, we spew untested toxins into the atmosphere to the point where mother’s milk contains dozens of unnatural chemical compounds. Our blindness to such interconnections reminds me of a Buddhist saying:, “The illusion of separateness is the source of all suffering.”

Systems View

Back 3,000 years ago, a second line of thinking was also at work: a systems view, consisting of ideas that didn’t fit within the reductionist paradigm. Roughly contemporary to Parmenides was the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus. Heraclitus said that everything was transformation and change. One of his metaphors was that people and all living creatures are like flames—the transformation of matter from one state to another. From this perspective, we are never the same or static, contradicting Parmenides’ assertion.

Biology seems to support Heraclitus. Consider that the matter in our skin exchanges itself with the rest of the world every month. Our liver, every six weeks. Our brain, every year. The cells in our body transform into air and earthworms and dogwoods and plankton and tigers and the woman standing next to us in the check-out line. As Lily Tomlin said:, “We all timeshare the same atoms.” We are a pattern through which matter passes.

HOW THE SYSTEM ACTUALLY BEHAVED

After water-efficiency programs helped people and businesses use less water, developers were able to build more houses, which boosted overall water usage. The shift toward low-flow toilets and other forms of conservation meant that, when a drought occurred, water users couldn’t cut back their usage any further, and the city had to make up for the shortfall by taking water from rivers and aquifers.

The ideas of Heraclitus and others have evolved through the centuries, sustained by thinkers such as Goethe. Since the 1940s, the field of systems understanding has blossomed with the work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Norbert Wiener, Jay Forrester, and others. At the heart of it, this perspective focuses on the interaction of the parts rather than the individual elements. For example, ecologists focus on how a tree interacts with soil, microbes, fungi, air, water, and animals. Therapists don’t focus just on an individual’s troubles, but also on his or her relationship with parents, siblings, children, and friends. Holistic doctors and healers, seeing a person as the interaction of mind, body, and spirit, look beyond symptoms to examine the underlying causes. Policymakers and business leaders consider multiple interactions as they design strategy.

What We Do

So, how would we think and act if we knew that we were truly interdependent? First, we wouldn’t see ourselves as victims of some unconnected external source. We see our actions and others’ as interdependent in what some Buddhist writers call “mutual co-arising.”

The viability of a life-sustaining society depends on our ability to experience now the longterm effects of our actions and to innovate with new behaviors and new tools.

With this new systems lens, if someone were to propose widening a bridge to alleviate traffic congestion, we could predict that the flow of cars would increase to fill the new capacity. Traffic and congestion mutually co-arise. As Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter, our buildings shape us.” In the same way, we shape the world; thereafter, the world shapes us.

Second, acknowledging our interconnectedness means recognizing that the CO2 that came out of my tailpipe as I drove this morning will warm the Earth, causing drought in Africa, producing floods in India, and intensifying hurricanes. The shirt I’m wearing was made in China, where I have no idea about the condition of the workers. How do we deal ethically with such a level of interdependence?

The viability of a life-sustaining society depends on our ability to experience now the long-term effects of our actions and to innovate with new behaviors and new tools. Our actions are in close connection with the world of reactions. This is what Martin Luther King, Jr., referred to as the “inescapable network of mutuality.”

These realizations open opportunities for us: gratitude and appreciation for the abundance of life, chances to respond to the pain of the world with effective action, and, in this unprecedented time when we live in each other’s backyards, we can pay attention to outcomes we are creating in the world.

It boils down to this: declaring each of us to be an intimate part of something—the holy, the universe, the web of all existence—anything greater than ourselves and then taking appropriate action. That is our work.

Andrew Jones (apjones@sustainer.org) is a Program Director for the Sustainability Institute. He consults with organizations, teaches system dynamics modeling and systems thinking, coaches leaders in organizational learning through the Donella Meadows Fellows Program, delivers public addresses, and writes columns and articles. Currently his primary efforts are creating system dynamics simulations on climate change strategy and with the CDC on chronic disease strategy.

Excerpted from a service delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville, North Carolina, June 24, 2007. The full service is available at www.sustainabilityinstitute.org/SIinfo/ AJones.html.

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