And educational institutions, in which predictability has long since become a fetish, are the most modern of modern institutions, having largely taken their present shape as putatively rational bureaucracies in the sixteenth century. Schools as we know them are one big plan, from the lesson plan expected daily from every teacher, through the curriculum scope and sequence, to the plan that governs every potential innovation. Reconstruction of the whole educational system is a supremely complicated process, one that does not come about by promulgating a neat plan and implementing it straight away. Education, like other domains of complex activity, turns on a myriad of significant variables. A plan cannot take all of these into account.
Unexpected interactions begin to drive implementation.
As a human experience, education is both an intensely personal process that unfolds over twenty years or more of an individual's life and a ubiquitous social operation that involves billions of persons the world around. It is too complicated for educators to plan a reconstructed system conceptually or implement it predictably. We can, however, shape an emerging system over time, effectively constituting key features of it through a process of social construction, if we develop a concerted sense of shared directions. 24 Coherent historical change wells up from many different acts that move parallel in time, spontaneously coordinating around an understanding of possibilities, at once emergent yet shared. Educators can best define the pedagogical opportunities arising with changing conditions by concerting independent actions, by developing shared understandings and purposes, by crafting a new common sense of where we stand and what we can do.