Includes bibliographical references.

Preliminary Material / Deborah Osberg and Gert Biesta -- Complexity, Education and Politics from the Inside-Out and the Outside-In / Gert Biesta and Deborah Osberg -- Five Theses on Complexity Reduction and its Politics / Gert Biesta -- Increasing Complexity by Reducing Complexity / Jens Rasmussen -- The Reduction of Critique in Education / Michel Alhadeff-Jones -- Lost Children and Anxious Adults / Noel Gough -- Normalising Standards in Educational Complexity / Tara Fenwick -- “Complex Global Problems, Simple Lifelong Learning Solutions.” Discuss / Richard Edwards -- The School and Learning Apparatus / Maarten Simons and Mark Olssen -- Assuming Equal Intelligence in School Music and Language Study / Ruth I. Gustafson -- Complexity, Consciousness and Curriculum / Brent Davis , Dennis Sumara and Tammy Iftody -- After a Rhetorics of Neutrality / John I’Anson -- Thinking Complexly / Donna Trueit and William E. Doll Jr. -- Taking Care of the Future? / Deborah Osberg -- Contributors / Deborah Osberg and Gert Biesta.

Complexity theory has become a major influence in discussions about the theory and practice of education. This book focuses on a question which so far has received relatively little attention in such discussions, which is the question of the politics of complexity. The chapters in this book engage with this question in a range of different ways. Whereas some contributions make a case for the promotion of complexity in education, others focus more explicitly on questions concerning the reduction of complexity in and through education. The chapters do so using theoretical, historical and empirical arguments, paying attention to a range of different educational settings (including early childhood education, school education, post-compulsory education, lifelong learning and work-based education), and focusing on different aspects of these practices (such as curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, architecture, and management). Taken together the chapters not only reveal the potential of complexity for engaging with questions about the politics of education in new and different ways. They also provide examples of a more reflexive engagement with the politics of complexity in education itself.