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QUOTE 5 from:
Lucas, C. (2001a) 'Complexity Theory: Actions for a Better World' Available from: http://www.calresco.org/action.htm#pro; accessed on 28/2/05

Educationally the world still lives in the 18th Century, a fantasy Newtonian scenario of disjoint parts and dualist logic, disproved <http://www.bestweb.net/~jond4u/newscien.htm> (even in physics) nearly 100 years ago. Our schools, further education and academic institutions remain locked in a straitjacket of specialist subjects, of objects, of 'facts', of reductionism. From statistician Vasily Nalimov:
"Words, on which our culture is based, do not and cannot have an atomistic meaning. It has become possible and even necessary to consider words as possessing fuzzy semantic fields over which the probabilistic distribution function is constructed and to consider people as probabilistic receivers"
Global Strategies Project, Pattern Learning: Probabilistic Vision of the World <http://www.uia.org/strategy/155alt52.htm>

In reductionism the interconnections between subjects are lost, and with them all those higher level fuzzy <lucas/fuzzy.htm> values that make our world interesting to humans, those associations that cannot be 'collected', classified and stored in museums. We have created a static world, a dusty collection of isolated fossils, gradually decaying before our eyes. This is the worldview <http://www.comnet.ca/~cdwilson/paradigm.htm> we are still teaching to today's children, the force feeding of conformity, of authority, of outside expertise, of fixed 'knowledge' that does not in any way fit the actual, multiple interacting values, of the world we inhabit. That world is one of accelerating change, of global interconnectivity, of multiple cultures, of literate people, of concern for the wider, cross-boundary, issues. If the models used by our bureaucracies (whether academic, political or business) cannot cope with such dynamic ideas then we need to replace <lucas/integrat.htm> them, not try to control humanity to fit those historically outdated boxes. And make no mistake whatsoever, all the knowledge and expertise to do this is already available (and in some cases has been for hundreds of years !), we are not talking some futuristic fantasy here. What is lacking is only the openness to recognise and employ any alternative systemic viewpoint.

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