Chaos and Summer Reading

You can’t see to the other side until you are there.
—Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton

My admonitions to students homebound this summer: Keep yourselves busy. Be curious; ask questions and then seek out the answers. Read. 

Those of us in education are certainly going to have no trouble keeping ourselves busy this summer as we search out and prepare multiple scenarios for a fall that seems shrouded in haze. We are consumed with questions whose answers appear elusive and simply seem to prompt ever more questions. Surrounded by turmoil, I find myself turning back to several of my favorite authors whose prescience seems particularly sharp at the moment. I started with The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton.

Linear thinking dominated much of the 20th century. If you do this, then that happens; if we change A, how does that affect B? Newtonian mechanics taught us that if you know everything about a system at some moment in time, then everything about the system’s future behavior should be predictable. The Holy Grail was weather; if only we had enough computing power we should be able to predict the weather. What we discovered, however, was that most systems are complex, with multiple, inter-connected parts, and they behave in non-linear realms where Newtonian analysis fails. 

Enter Chaos Theory, which concerns itself with subtle organizing principles in seemingly random and disordered systems. This was the central theme of Crichton’s novel, Jurassic Park, eloquently explicated by the character of mathematician Ian Malcolm. Speaking of major changes, he notes: “You can’t see to the other side until you are there.”

In 1987, a group of distinguished scholars from a variety of disciplines, including physics, economics, biology, and computer science, gathered together because they were dissatisfied with some of the traditional wisdom of their fields. The story of the Santa Fe Institute is recounted engagingly by Mitchell Waldrop in Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Chaos, another compelling read.

Complexity Theory is at the core of Crichton’s sequel, The Lost World: “Complex systems tend to locate themselves at a place we call ‘the edge of chaos.’ ” It turns out that organizations need to balance order and uncertainty in order to thrive. Too much order breeds stagnation; too much uncertainty leads to chaos. That’s where we are now. The coronavirus pandemic has pushed us over the edge. Turbulence requires nimbleness, and in the temporary absence of structure, innovation explodes. The longer the uncertainty lasts, the greater the opportunity for spontaneous reorganization of the system. (And here I point you towards Emergence: The Connected Lives of Brains, Cities, and Software, by Steven Johnson.)

I find it somewhat ironic that US institutions of higher education are so often characterized as dens of liberal thought, since, at their core they are bastions of conservative capitalism. In The End of College, author Kevin Carey outlines the origins of the modern university and emphasizes their vested interest in maintaining their dominance. The American education system is a gargantuan beast and one of the prime drivers of the global economy. It wants to go back.

The testing agencies as well, College Board and ACT, are multi-billion dollar behemoths facing an existential threat as droves of colleges suspend requirements for 2021. What if many of those schools decide they can fill a class just as well without scores?

Last October, ACT announced that “Section Retesting,” the ability to re-take individual sections of the test, would be an option, beginning this fall, for any student who had taken at least one full administration of the ACT. As late as May 19, they were holding webinars titled: “Why You Should Choose Section Retesting.” Then on May 29, ACT disclosed that there would be precious few test centers available for the June 13 administration, and they are cautioning that the July administration may be heavily impacted, as well. On June 18, ACT backtracked and said that Section Retesting would be postponed. When I am feeling magnanimous, I applaud ACT’s stated motivation that they want to reserve as many spaces as possible for first-time test takers because of the disruption due to COVID-19. On the other hand, when my emotional pendulum swings inexorably towards cynicism, I can't help but notice that fees for the full test are higher than those for section retests, and that students are only eligible for section retesting once they have completed the full battery. Fewer students paying reduced fees vs. more students paying higher fees. 

No, ACT and College Board are not going to stand idly by as the pandemic eats away at their core business. They will respond. So will schools. As Ian Malcolm says: “Life finds a way.” Happy reading!