In intelligent systems, characteristic of human societies, everything can be redesigned and everything is temporary. Each element in the system is capable of thinking, as well as doing. Society functions, as a result, more as a form of parallel, rather than serial, processing. One of the worldwide challenges facing education today is how to provide learners with new thinking tools appropriate to and congruent with such a connected world. In most countries, for example, school children continue to be inducted into linear modes of thinking, in which cause precedes effect in a neatly arranged series of steps.
Most disciplines also tend to ignore knowledge and modes of inquiry outside their boundaries.
Introducing students, or other learners for that matter, to complexity and uncertainty, rather than inducting them into established and time worn recipes for understanding a static world, to some extent, challenges the socializing and enculturating function of educational institutions.