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4.2 Education Systems 69

consider a curriculum as a subsystem within the larger instructional system. In
short, one can elaborate an education system in terms of subsystems.
Principles for an Education System
(1) Overall principle
A system should be effective in fulfilling its purpose. An instructional system
should have integrity, in the sense of being reliably effective; this is the essential
characteristic of a system and the core of system theory. A system is composed of
elements within an environment and should interact in a way that fulfills the
purpose of the system. The overall principle of an education system requires
coordinating the relationships among teachers, learners, and resources.
(2) Feedback principle
A system should be stable. From a system dynamics point of view, there are two
kinds of feedback mechanisms within a system—positive or reinforcing feedback
and negative or balancing feedback (Spector, 2015). As an example, the moon is
orbiting the earth at a speed of more than 3600 km an hour. At that speed, it would
keep going into outer space and not return each day; in this case, one can say that
gravitational attraction of the earth on the moon serves as a balancing mechanism or
a kind of negative feedback control that keeps the system stable and the moon in
orbit around the earth.
The feedback principle tells us that an instructional system also has feedback
mechanisms. One can think of assessments as a kind of balancing mechanism that
helps to keep an instructional system stable. If all students simply attended and then
left without any kind of assessment (neither formative nor summative), the system
would become unstable and unable to attain its intended purpose of helping stu-
dents develop knowledge and master skills. If all that matter in an instructional
system are the number of participants without any consideration of learning, then
the system is unlikely to fulfill its instructional purpose. Some have criticized early
massive open online courses (MOOCs) for this very reason.
(3) Order principle
Order refers to the nature and structural functions of a system. Systems can be
categorized along a simple-to-complex scale. Systems can also be categorized along
a disordered-to-ordered scale. Given the prior mention of thinking about an edu-
cation system as a collection of subsystems, one can then categorize the subsystems
as progressing along these two scales (simple-to-complex, and disordered-
to-ordered).
Typically, an education system will have complex but ordered subsystems. One
might argue that if one thinks in terms of grade-level educational subsystems, they
do progress from simple and relatively disordered at an elementary level to a more
complex and more ordered level as one proceeds to a secondary and tertiary level.