That cleverness works systematically and in this not unlike Art with Surprise, with Irritation, with 'incongruent perspectives'. It uses radical abstraction as a source for oblique views on seemingly well-known phenomena.
She systematically restages the old philosophical wonder: by enabling peculiar reconstructions and reformulations, centered around the difference of the system.
If one is inclined to think that things stand, this theory will say with Heinrich von Kleist: everything that stands, stands because it falls: "There I went, turned in on myself, through the arched gate, pondering back into the city. Why, I thought, does the vault not sink in, since it has no support? It stands, I answer, because all the stones want to collapse at once - and I drew from this thought an indescribably refreshing consolation, which always stood by me until the decisive moment with the hope that I, too, would hold on when everything let me sink."
Seen in this way, theory moves into the functional position of a 'troublemaker'. The fact that it can be understood as a plague may be due to this cross-headedness.
An example: The fact that teachers ask questions whose answers they already know is a simple finding. It becomes exciting when one asks what function this curious technique of asking questions has.
For systems theory assumes that it is intended to generate and test students' willingness to give exactly those answers that they know teachers consider correct. it is thus not a matter of factually correct or incorrect questions, but of the ability and willingness to live up to the teacher's expectations. The assumption behind this is that it is a central achievement of schools to transform children as non-trivial machines into 'trivial machines' (Heinz von Foerster), the type of good students, who are predictable and easily manageable.
Another aspect of the system-theoretical view of education; if one says that the impossible (at least mysterious) operation of education is extremely improbable with regard to its success, to its acceptance, to the binding nature of its assumptions of meaning, then one can (guided by theory) search for the symbolically generalized communication medium that transforms this improbability into probability. What increases the chances of success of pedagogical communication? Historically, the idea of pedagogical eros, the close emotional bond of the student to the teacher as authority (mother substitute or father figure) was claimed for this. Another medium of pedagogical communication was corporal punishment. How can pedagogical communication succeed without a close emotional bond and without corporal punishment, what are the functional equivalents? Other media are developed and tested, for example the medium of appeal, of request. (Be diligent, try hard, ...)
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One quickly understands how it could come to the differentiation of appeal cultures (for example at comprehensive schools), and just as quickly why these cultures are doomed to failure: Every appeal forces the view on other possibilities, it awakens the counter-sense, it increases contingency. It virtually challenges contradictoriness.
It is equally stimulating (disturbing) to understand the rationality of the educational business no longer as a moment of a general world rationality, but as a 'bounded rationality', as a rationality of the system, which - for example - endows every operation of educating with the characteristics of the 'good intention', so that in the end a self-moralizing system emerges, that on the one hand holds on to the ideal of scientifically oriented education, on the other hand handles the distinction between respect and disregard in such a way that the idea of good, of 'successful' education is always in play - in contrast to bad education, which is to be disregarded and is not attributed to the system with its good intentions. The system is calibrated one-sidedly from this perspective and up to its reflection instance 'pedagogy'. Its self-description is (and must be): goodness-heavy.
No less interesting for an analysis of the educational business is the famous level distinction: Interaction, Organization, Society. It is a heuristic instrument with which different boundary-forming processes of social systems, related to a system in the focus of attention (here the system of education), can be distinguished.
Education, that is, takes place under conditions of interaction, it is at the same time undoubtedly bound to organizations, and: it serves a social function, be it that of allocating careers or be it that of standardizing the starting chances of careers, which at the same time represents the take-off for the inequality of biographies. For relevant analyses interested in structures and processes of interaction, organization and society with regard to education, complexly differentiated pieces of theory are now available.
These are, of course, only a few impressions of what was described above as irritation, as incongruent vision. Sufficiently many analyses in system-theoretical diction are available, especially by Niklas Luhmann himself, whom the educational system stimulated to investigations throughout his life. Crucially, these analyses have led and continue to lead to results that do not boast of making educating itself easier and more effective. The opposite would probably be truer.
Systems theory is not a theory of applied sciences. It stops, and for Peter Fuchs this is its peculiar charm, respectfully at the gates of the phenomena it seeks to explain. It shares results and assumes (on the basis of theorems gained in itself such as autonomy, autopoiesis, self-referential closure, etc.) that systems such as the Educational System absorb the irritations in their own way (in their own operativity) and exploit them for their own information processing.
What high abstraction does and how useful it is to be confronted with it is not decided in theory, but at the places of its reception. Peter Fuchs himself thinks that theory guarantees only one thing: that it can be used to maintain contact with a mobile, oblique, and astonishing thinking that offers the chance to set the routinized cognitions of one's own domain in motion.