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HistoryThis paper considers questions of continuity and change in education from the perspective of complexity theory, introducing the field to educationists who might not be familiar with it. Given a significant degree of complexity in a particular environment (or "dynamical system"), new properties and behaviours, which are not necessarily contained in the essence of the constituent elements or able to be predicted from a knowledge of initial conditions, will emerge. These concepts of emergent phenomena from a critical mass, associated with notions of lock-in, path dependence, and inertial momentum, suggest that it is in the dynamic interactions and adaptive orientation of a system that new phenomena, new properties and behaviours, emerge. The focus thus shifts from a concern with decontextualised and universalised essence to contextualised and contingent complex wholes. This is where complexity theory seeks the levers of history. The paper posits the notion of inertial momentum as the conceptual link between the principle of emergent phenomena as developed principally in the natural sciences and the notion of socio-historical change in human society. It is argued that educational and institutional change is less a consequence of effecting change in one particular factor or variable, and more a case of generating momentum in a new direction by attention to as many factors as possible. Complexity theory suggests, in other words, that what it might take to change a school's inertial momentum from an ethos of failure is massive and sustained intervention at every possible level until the phenomenon of learning excellence emerges from this new set of interactions among these new factors, and sustains itself autocatalytically. The paper concludes with a summary consideration of the conditions that contribute to the emergence of new properties and behaviours in a system.

Following a brief introduction to complexity theory, this paper considers how various themes in the field relate to the philosophical study of education. Issues and questions introduced include the challenge of complexity theory for the philosophy of education--and, conversely, some critical challenges for complexity theory from educational philosophy; complexity theory and educational continuity and change; the importance that complexity theory places on interpretive perspectives that are transphenomenal, transdisciplinary and transdiscursive; the risks of simplifying complexity to a point that excludes its ambiguities and includes only its dominant usages; the degree of coherence between Dewey's philosophical orientation and that of complexity theory; how Foucault might be read as a complexity theorist; how educational research informed by complexity theory might ask different questions with different analytical perspectives--connectionist, holistic, non-linear, rather than input-output "black-box" causal modelling, for example; and how curriculum, teaching, the epistemology of schooling, and the "education of consciousness"--understood as an emergent phenomenon--might be different when viewed from the perspective of complexity theory.

This paper introduces some of the debates in the field of critical thinking by highlighting differences among thinkers such as Siegel, Ennis, Paul, McPeck, and Martin, and poses some questions that arise from these debates. Does rationality transcend particular cultures, or are there different kinds of thinking, different styles of reasoning? What is the relationship between critical thinking and learning? In what ways does the moral domain overlap with these largely epistemic and pedagogical issues? The paper concludes by showing how Peters, Evers, Chan and Yan, Ryan and Louie, Luntley, Lam, Doddington, and Kwak, respond to these questions.

The implementation of education programmes in different cultures invites the question whether we are justified in doing so in cultures that may reject the programmes' underlying principles. Are there indeed ethical principles and educational ideals that can be justified as applicable to all cultures? After a consideration of Zygmunt Bauman's postmodern rejection of the possibility of universal ethics, I cite and extend Harvey Siegel's defence of multiculturalism as a transcultural ethical ideal. I conclude the paper with a justification of the transcultural normative reach of moral principles that I have elsewhere defended as the ethics of integrity. The paper's significance lies in its justification of educational interventions founded in these principles across different cultures.