Sociological observations of the educational system: A systems-theoretical perspective

Abstract

This article presents introductory considerations on a sociological outside description of the educational system. After this particular form of a sociological perspective has been determined, which, unlike pedagogical research, does not necessarily depend on the fact that its observations in the educational system can be connected, this distanced form of observation is shown by three examples: the question of the form of the educational system and its boundaries, the significance of the system for the inequality structure of modern society, and finally the form of uncertain action in educational processes.

Introduction

The educational system is first and foremost the subject of pedagogy or educational science. Nonetheless, other disciplines have also dealt with the subject of education and socialization, so that in sociology, for example, the significance of such processes for society has always been in demand since the founding of the discipline. However, this socio-analytical approach is not reserved for sociology. One need only think of the research on the cultural memory of society, where the educational system is assigned the function of cultural memory. Education is described there as a system in which it is a matter of preservation, of conveying what is worth preserving (Assmann, 1993). The educational system thus functions as an administrator of society’s cultural memory and is therefore naturally also an essential topic of sociological societal analysis. However, whether this cultural-scientific interpretation of education can be a consensus in sociology may be doubted. It is more likely to be agreed that the educational system is the system which, in the course of its differentiation from society and its further internal differentiation, has specialized in the transmission of socially relevant knowledge and values. Thus this system always also covers an aspect of the future by preparing individuals for life in society and its subsystems through these transmission services.

This article is neither about a pedagogical analysis nor about an educational sociological analysis of the educational system in the narrower sense, but about the observation of the educational system from the perspective of sociological theory or general sociology. First of all, this distinction is briefly justified: as indicated, several possibilities have emerged in society for observing the most diverse educational processes in a theoretical and empirical way. I would now like to distinguish only three forms and then concentrate on the last form in my remarks. The three forms are based on the fundamental distinction between self-description close to the educational system and strictly external outside description. ¹ A contribution to the self-description of a function system can be made both internally and externally (Schmidt, 2000). The normatively structured pedagogy, which strives for reform reflection and whose primary aim is to be linked to the practice of the educational system, can be described as a committed self-description. On the other hand, educational science is at the same time another form of self-description: a distanced self-description. This form must be connectable in the communication of the system. At the same time, however, it must also keep in mind the connectivity of its findings in science (for details, see Kurtz, 2000a).

The strictly distanced outside description of sociology should be distinguished from these two forms of self-description. While education and the educational system are the primary subjects of pedagogy and educational science, for sociology this is only one of the many fields of action occurring in society in which it can gain new insights and carry out comparative analyses. The two forms of self-description must identify with the institutions and goals of the educational system. In terms of plausibility and motivation, they are in a continuum with this system (Kieserling, 2000), so that the described finds itself well catered for in the description. Sociology, on the other hand, does not have to submit to precisely this procedure: It can describe the educational system from a radically distanced observer perspective. ²

A more detailed consideration of the form of the sociological outside description of the educational system would have to trace the crucial phases of the development of theory in sociology and could investigate this on the basis of the development of Émile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann (for details, see Kurtz, 2007b).

In this way, of course, differences in the value that the three authors attach to the different forms of educational processes are noticeable. For Durkheim, for example, knowledge transfer processes play only a subordinate role. He concentrates entirely on educational and socialization processes, without clearly distinguishing between the two (Durkheim, 2005a). In contrast to French pedagogy, he described education with a sociological reinterpretation as a social fact and tried to use it for a committed self-description of French society (Durkheim, 1963). Parsons, on the other hand, defines education as the different forms of education at school and university and in vocational training, and sometimes also includes classical educational aspects under the term ‘socialization’. For him, educational processes, professional occupations and the university are virtually the most important aspects in the development of the structure of modern society (see Parsons, 1971: 94–98; Parsons and Platt, 1973). With this interpretation of the subject of education, Parsons has advanced to become a pioneer of the theory of the knowledge society, who still receives far too little attention. And finally, for Luhmann, intentional education and non-intentional socialization are the central elements for the shaping of the person. He is also the one who has most radically taken the outside sociological view of the educational system. In contrast to the different system levels of Parsons’ general system of action, Luhmann (2002) has characterized education as an autopoietically closed function system of modern society that exists on one level alongside other function systems.

In the further remarks on a sociological observation of the educational system, a system-theoretical position is now taken in the broadest sense, which does not mean, however, that we cannot go beyond Luhmann’s narrow guidelines. ³ This is illustrated by three examples: (a) the question of the form of the educational system and its boundaries; (b) the significance of the system for the inequality structure of modern society; and finally (c) the form of uncertain action in educational processes and their significance for the structure of the educational system.

Education as a system

In the course of the societal restructuring of the primacy of differentiation from stratification to functional differentiation, a particular system for education developed in society in the 18th century – a system whose primary task is to educate and train. Of course, even before the differentiation of a functional education system, there was intentional education to a certain extent: for example, in the monastic schools of the Middle Ages or the early modern universities. Moreover, of course, there is also intentional education in the family system, but the essential difference here lies in the fact that in the family the intentional education is only handled situationally and therefore has no system character. Aspects of education within the family do not build on each other like the school classes but takes place quasi-parallel in the execution of the family’s everyday life. The once-born human being becomes a person only through socialization and intentional as well as non-intentional education. And both the family and the individual have a particular function here. However, this shaping of the life courses of children, adolescents and partly also adults only takes on an organized system character in the field of education.

In modern society, the educational system is the function system that specializes in the teaching of knowledge and values and their evaluation and appropriation. ⁴ This social subsystem is not about producing new insights as in science, but mainly about preservation in the form of conveying what is worth preserving. In the context of the educational system, it is about changes in people. Education is an intentional communication process in which individuals by teaching knowledge and values about other areas of society are prepared for life in society and its subsystems. In order to fulfill this task, the educational system has for a long time referred exclusively to the profession of the teacher and the organization of the school. While until a few years ago analyses of this societal subsystem could mainly be carried out as analyses of the school system, in the course of the debates on lifelong learning supplemented by the institutions of adult education, special attention has been paid to early childhood education for some time now.

In any case, the outstanding role that the leading profession of the teacher, together with the school organization, has long played in this system has been increasingly questioned in many parts of the world in recent years, with reference to the changes in the demands for knowledge and skills in the knowledge society. On the one hand, in the developed countries of the world, early childhood education is currently becoming increasingly crucial in the educational system. And on the other hand, the social positioning function of individuals in society is no longer taken over only by schools, vocational training and universities, but increasingly also by forms of further training based on them. Nevertheless, another occupational group does not necessarily gain a dominant position in the system of education. Instead, it can be observed that the action knowledge of the system is increasingly deposited in the organizations in which the various pedagogical performance roles are socialized.

What is possible in the educational system is decided in the organizations of the system. These organizations force their decision-making mechanisms on education, for example, by making it possible to link individual phases of life through organizationally specific certificates and attestations. However, although of course every form of intentional education depends on organization, education and organization do not merge. Child day care centers and schools cannot be observed and described exclusively as educational organizations, because here, too, the performance roles work for money. Nor are any organizations conceivable in which intentional processes of conveying knowledge and values would not be possible. The form of education is a central theme in the most diverse areas of society. Knowledge and values in the family are thus imparted in a largely non-organized form. And in educational organizations such as schools and adult education centers, but also universities, the mediation process takes place in organizations which are primarily oriented towards the differentiation of the educational system – and, of course, the university is also oriented towards the science system.

In addition to these educational processes in the narrower context of the educational system, there are also organized pedagogical transmission processes that can be found in organizations that are primarily oriented towards other function systems. Particular emphasis must be placed on the increasingly expanding area of further company training. This form takes place in organizations that are oriented towards the economic system and therefore do not initially pursue the goal of making an active contribution to the formation of personal biographies via educational processes. Of course, further vocational training in enterprises is also about imparting knowledge – that is, pedagogical communication. However, this does not aim so much at changing people but serves in the broadest sense as a means to the end of generating solvency. While the aim of pedagogical organizations is the connectivity of individuals in society or on the labor market, further vocational training in enterprises is primarily concerned with the connectivity of organizations on the economic market (for details, see Kurtz, 2002).

For business organizations, this is not a problem if educational processes take place under an economic primacy. However, this could become problematic for the self-image of professional practitioners if they ask themselves what values they should feel committed to as teachers and planners in further company training: is one then actually still a pedagogue or already an organizational developer?

Another current example of the demarcation of the educational sector can be found in the media sector: in the context of imparting useful knowledge and values, educational work today is increasingly influenced by distribution media such as television and more and more computers, tablets and smartphones. In the USA, for example, many children learn at home in front of the screen and do that completely without the involvement of professional teachers or the school organization. Computer learning programs in connection with the care of the children by a parent are an alternative to expensive private schools. At any rate, the German segment of the educational system is still resistant to these tendencies at the moment, because here there is not only compulsory education as in other European countries, but also explicit compulsory schooling. Of course, you do not have to take a favorable view of the American example. For many women, the expansion of homeschooling can be a step back in terms of gender equality, given that children learning at home on the computer need to be supervised. And this is usually still done by the mothers.

In general, however, one can observe in the field of education that with the advent of the new media, self-organized learning is gaining more and more influence. Niklas Luhmann, for example, almost indirectly touches on this aspect when he introduces his book about the mass media with the sentence: ‘Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media’ (2000: 1). Of course, this form of media knowledge transfer must be distinguished from professional pedagogical knowledge transfer. Knowledge is not imparted here in ways that build on one another; rather, one has to make use of a range of possibilities in a patchwork manner. Moreover, pedagogical communication no longer takes place here as an interaction between those present, but rather in the absence of the professional performance role to a large extent. In a way, the asymmetrical relationship between experts and clients, which is characteristic of professional work, is also eliminated. And whether the transmission of knowledge and values in the mass media is a form of pedagogical communication is an open question. Finally, indeed knowledge and values can be conveyed here, but when it comes to their acquisition by learners, no distinction is usually made between better and worse performances. ⁵

What follows from all this for the question of the structure of the educational system? Using the distinction of interaction, organization and society in Luhmann (1975), the distinction between unity and difference of the educational system in society can be determined more precisely. At the level of interaction, at least, the transmission of knowledge and values is always an educational process. And this applies not only to organizationally framed interactions at school, but also to the transfer of knowledge in business enterprises, trade unions or museums. Like the comprehensive social system of society, interaction is composed of communication. It can only be differentiated within society and is thus an integral part of society. If this communication among those present is now oriented towards the guiding distinction of a function system, as is the case with pedagogical communication in schools, kindergartens or adult education centers, then this is at the same time a contribution to the autopoietic reproduction of the social subsystem. In this sense, all the various educational measures that can be found in the world – no matter where they are spatially located – operate as pedagogical transmission processes in the social context of the educational system and have their common system context in this context. They are all communicative components of the educational system.

But not all of these forms of pedagogical knowledge transfer belong to the core of the educational system at the same time. One should therefore only speak of a core area of the educational system if the three levels of interaction, organization and society all follow the pedagogical primacy. In other words: if the intention is to convey something useful for the life of people in organizations that follow the primacy of the educational system (i.e. school, kindergarten and adult education center). The pedagogical processes observable elsewhere belong to the pedagogical field in the broadest sense, but not to its core area at the same time. One can think of the mass media or pedagogical communications in economic organizations, and of course of family education. Family education is a form of education that very seldom evaluates its children according to their differences in performance and which, moreover, seems to do without the forms of organization and profession.

In summary, it can be said that knowledge and values can be conveyed everywhere in society. And this is also true in those areas to which we initially do not assign a place in the educational system: in the family, in organizations that do not primarily specialize in educational processes, or in the media. Ultimately, therefore, we find pedagogical communications not only at the core of the educational system, but also at its periphery. And this border can then also be the subject of the organizations of other function systems, but as a rule not of the non-educational occupations or professions. ⁶

The distinction made here between a core area and a peripheral area of the educational system describes the current situation in many national segments of the world educational system. Nevertheless, it can of course also be observed that, on the one hand, lifelong learning has become indispensable in the modern knowledge society and that digitally supported homeschooling will also gain in importance in the future. At the same time, however, basic school education and vocational training are of course a prerequisite for the often self-organized lifelong learning, and homeschooling can currently supplement school attendance, but probably not yet replace it. But however the educational sector develops, this can only be speculated about here. Ultimately, this will be decided in the autopoietically operating educational system itself. And if, following Dirk Baecker’s considerations on the so-called next society based on computers and the Internet, one were to assume that the structural form of this society is no longer functional differentiation but differentiation via networks (see Baecker, 2018), then the future structure of the educational sector will also be even more difficult to predict.

Education and social inequality

That brings me to the second example of a sociological observation of the educational system. ⁷ When one talks about how to deal with inequality in modern society, there are mainly three starting points: (a) the general and mostly financial support from the welfare state; (b) the system of social help, which functions as a social catchment area for social inequality and is intended to ensure that everyone can participate in all areas of society; and finally (c) enabling equal opportunities through education and training. When I deal with this third aspect in the following remarks, then of course links with the other two areas must always be taken into account. Educational processes can be supported by the welfare state and ultimately result in intervention by social help or can be accompanied by socio-pedagogical measures.

The topic of education is one on which everyone can feel called to have a say because somehow it concerns everyone. That includes not only the parents fighting for their children’s chances, but also the elites concerned about the future of their countries. One could observe this some time ago in the reactions to the results of the first Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study. This study has shown, for example, that in Germany, despite the expansion of education, the educational success of children continues to depend clearly on their social background. The last PISA study certified slight improvements in Germany, and this was immediately rated as a great success by politicians. Nevertheless, the fundamental evil remains: the chances of a child from a high-income family receiving a recommendation for a high school are almost three times as high as those of a working-class child, and the chance of starting a course of study is even more than seven times as high. However, these results could only surprise those who had always listened away. Concerning the perspective of inequality, PISA only presented to the public what was known in international educational research long before PISA.

Sociologically, the apparent communication problems between science, politics and educational practice could now be examined more closely, but I would like to point to something else in the following. What is noticeable in the debates that take place, especially in science, is first of all the particular role ascribed to the educational system. This may give the impression that the educational system here is to function as the central system responsible for the inequality structure of modern society – quasi as a supersystem. And by the way, this is not only true for educational research, but also describes the direction in sociological inequality research. For example, the German sociologist Helmut Schelsky (1962: 17–18) defined the educational system, and in particular the institution of school, as the central place where opportunities for later life are distributed.

In the current discussion, for example, two basic tasks or functions are attributed to the educational system: on the one hand, it is intended to compensate for inequalities in social origin and, on the other, to ensure a secure and predictable future. However, as educational research up to PISA has shown, schools in Germany, in particular, cannot compensate for the different influences of the family. But also, hypothetically, once it was assumed that the school would create equal opportunities, one would have to ask the following question: would this also give us equal opportunities in society or the economy, or would it perhaps just be equal opportunities in the educational system?

The PISA studies have shown that origin plays an essential role in the chances in life. At the same time, however, no one will want to claim that origin alone would play the decisive role. That would be a historical argument. The real social inequalities existing today are not only remnants of stratification, but also beyond that are the result of the functional differentiation of society itself (Beck et al., 1994; Luhmann, 1997: 774;). The form of inclusion of the stratified society was that of origin – it depended more on who expressed something than on what was said. However, with the dissolution of the layered structure in the transition to modernity, the bourgeoisie began to established itself; it substituted the social inclusion form of origin with the inclusion form of money and education. And today, the two systems of education and the economy based on them are, on the one hand, producers of social inequality, but, on the other hand, also offer opportunities for individuals to deal with the severe differences in life chances and to reduce them. However, of course, this does not mean that origin would no longer play a role today. Positions are certainly no longer awarded directly by criteria of origin. They are conveyed through careers, but characteristics of origin more or less influence the form of educational and employment careers.

In the 1970s, the question of the relationship between education and social inequality led to a debate on the illusion of equal opportunities, launched in France (see Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970) and pursued in other countries. Now it was no longer a question of the possibilities of social change through education, but of the forms of reproduction of social inequality through education. Thus current studies also show a simultaneity of educational expansion and continuing social inequalities. Although the educational opportunities of boys and girls have equalized, at the same time there have been only minor changes in the level of class-specific participation in education. Although in all PISA participating states a connection between the social origin and acquired competencies can be observed, this is particularly close in Germany. In simplified terms, the results of the PISA studies show that at the lowest competence levels children of simple social origin and migrant families are found, while children of the upper social classes dominate the highest competence levels. This is connected on the one hand with educational decisions, and on the other hand with the idea of equal opportunities based on the performance principle.

Regarding inequality, transitions from one system to another always pose a particular problem, whereby the educational decision with the most far-reaching consequences is undoubtedly the one at the end of primary school. This has two levels with the recommendations of teachers and the decisions of parents. It can be seen, for example, that teacher judgments at school depend not only on the underlying cognitive abilities and performances of the children, but also to a large extent on their class affiliation (see, for example, Ditton, 2008). However, the educational decisions in families also depend on class affiliation. The interesting question at this point is not so much why parents from higher social strata are necessarily striving for a great career for their child, but rather why parents with a lower social status avoid it. One possible reason can be seen, for example, in the lack of correspondence between the educational content of schools and the experient-oriented relevance structures of families from lower social strata. In this context, educational decisions could also be based on the fear that for educational advancers from the lower strata, attaining a higher education can be not only a privilege but also a curse – if the children alienate themselves from their family of origin and lose the rationalities of action they have acquired in a milieu-specific way (see Grundmann et al., 2008).

I see the second major problem in the generally shared idea of equal opportunities based primarily on the performance principle – the meritocratic model and its consequences. This model corresponds first of all to the basic functional description of educational systems in modern society. Their function is mainly to prepare pupils for a life in society by imparting knowledge and values and evaluating their appropriation. If this selection is made by performance, no one has anything against it. However, it becomes problematic with selection due to differences in origin or gender. ⁸

According to the model of proportionality, full equal opportunities would now be achieved if the distribution of groups of origin, sexes and ethnic groups at the various hierarchical levels of the educational institutions corresponded to their respective share of the total population. The meritocratic model, on the other hand, is based first and foremost on the principle of placing everyone according to their abilities and achievements. However, as the results of PISA and other empirical studies show impressively, the selection is never just a distinction according to performance. It is also always conditioned by the origin factors of the family, which have their beginning before the actual school career and accompany educational processes more or less conducive. In this sense, following Bourdieu and Passeron, one can define the notion of fair educational competition under the keyword ‘meritocracy’ as a myth. In this way, unequal educational opportunities in modern society cannot only not be reduced, but can also be legitimized (see Solga, 2005).

Meritocracy is based on the idea that in our society everyone can achieve anything by performance – regardless of social criteria such as origin, gender or ethnicity. If one then pursues the naturally supportive goal of guaranteeing every child the same chance of an educational career, all children must, of course, be treated equally without preconditions. For the school, children from different social classes are then equal and treated in the same way, despite their different initial distinctions and their different dispositions about cultural capital. However, precisely so can arise the problem that here differences in the endowment of cultural capital are naturalized as individual differences in talent. One possible problematic conclusion to be drawn from all this would be the statement that intelligence can be inherited and that smarter children are generally born into the upper social strata.

Ultimately, however, the educational system will not be able to leave the different influences of origin outside the school gates. That is evident in all PISA participating states, and it will then depend on how these socially determined influences are dealt with in educational institutions. At any rate, the situation in Germany so far is that since the 1960s the educational opportunities of all classes have improved, but at the same time the severe inequalities typical of the class have not been eliminated. Realistically, the educational system cannot offer the same opportunities to every child. However, even if the school could achieve equal opportunities regardless of factors of origin, the question remains whether this would at the same time lead to such equal opportunities in society and its subsectors. Strictly speaking, this would mean that the educational system could determine how future careers run and how other organizations in the economic system, for example, allocate participation opportunities.

Of course, the economy is increasingly demanding better educated and more flexible people. However, pedagogy does not aim to satisfy the economy but to provide opportunities for people outside the educational system. The aim here is to promote individual people and not, as in the economy, to promote company interests as far as possible. And it is precisely this consideration of the relationship between education and the economy as a pair of opposites that has an impact on the issue of social inequality (see Kurtz, 2009). Nevertheless, it must be borne in mind that it is too simple to think that more and more vocational knowledge per se offers more excellent opportunities for gainful employment. Empirical studies, at any rate, show quite clearly that even today people with the same qualifications acquired in the educational system have unequal chances of a working and employment career. From this point of view, social inequality is not only carried forward by the educational system and the economic system, but is also reinforced in the transitions from education to work and employment.

The transitional problems between the educational system and the economic system are most impressively illustrated by the example of women’s work and employment opportunities. In contrast to migrants and people from the lower social strata, they are not disadvantaged in the educational system and thus have at least the same starting conditions as men. Today there is a general increase in the number of women in paid work (see Rubery et al., 1999). Nevertheless, the chances of women and men in the labor market still differ considerably in terms of reputation and level of employment (see, for example, Charles, 1992). Qualified and highly qualified women still do not appear in working life according to their qualifications. ⁹ And if, for example, they establish themselves more and more in the legal profession, then it is mainly in the areas of family and social affairs, and less in criminal, administrative and commercial law. Although this in no way affects the functional differentiation of society, the limitation of scarce resources still affects certain sections of the population more than others.

The fact is that people with the same qualifications acquired in the educational system still have unequal chances of a career in work and employment due to gender or origin. And this is a clear sign that there does not seem to be a linear causal relationship between the different forms of education in the context of the educational system and the level of work and employment. For the equal opportunities achieved in the educational system can be interpreted in the economic system according to entirely different standards of value. The systems of education and the economy are fundamentally not positively coordinated with one another, and the same also applies to the relationship between all the other function systems of society.

The example of women’s employment careers can, therefore, show us that inequalities in modern society cannot be measured solely by the level of participation in education or school performance. However, the inequalities only become apparent in the world of work and in the way in which other systems of society access the qualifications acquired. In this sense, it cannot be assumed that the educational system is the dominant social system for the inequality structure of society, which should be responsible for quasi autonomously for the allocation of social opportunities. The expansion of education since the 1960s has not significantly increased equal opportunities in society. This is because it is not only decided in the educational system, but in particular also through the implementation of the acquired educational level in the environment of the educational system. And this is because the educational system cannot interfere with the autonomy of other function systems. It cannot, therefore, ensure that women earn as much as men, but only offer pupils the same educational opportunities.

Uncertain action and society

As a third example of a sociological observation of the educational system, I have chosen the uncertainty problem in pedagogical action, but this cannot be viewed in isolation; it is the particular expression of the development of society as a whole. Therefore, first of all, the fundamental problem of acting in the knowledge society should be emphasized, and the peculiarities of professional acting should be outlined. The description of society as a knowledge society is a description of society that can be reduced to a concept similar to that of the risk society or the organizational society and thus shows what is for them the outstanding characteristic for defining modern society. At the same time, however, it draws attention to a fundamental problem of action. Anyone who speaks of action must at the same time also address the other side of it – knowledge. In both traditional societies and the modern knowledge society, knowledge is a necessary prerequisite for action. For Nico Stehr (1992), knowledge can be defined as the ability to act, like the ability to social action. Without knowledge, there would be only instinctive behavior, but no intentional action. However, precisely this knowledge, which is a condition for action, also becomes a problem of action in the modern knowledge society: it turns action into uncertain action.

Compared to pre-modern and early-modern societies, the relationship between knowledge and action in modernity has changed radically. The immense increase in knowledge in today’s society opens up such a variety of possibilities for action that knowledge is increasingly losing security, because with the increase of knowledge, non-knowledge, as its other side, always also increases. And the adaptation of specific knowledge immediately raises the question of whether other knowledge would not have been more appropriate. In this sense, the increasingly knowledge-based form of society leads not only to a multi-optionality of action (Gross, 1994), but also to the risk of making the wrong decision (Beck, 1992). The multiplying and often contradicting knowledge of modernity leads to a loss of confidence in action. Today, it is no longer possible to include all options for action in one’s decision-making, and this ultimately results in the compulsion to act without a sufficiently secure knowledge base. Thus it will come as no surprise that today a particular form of knowledge is becoming more and more significant, namely the knowledge about how to deal with insecurity and uncertainty. One only has to look at large organizations that invest an enormous amount of capital, time and personnel in the procurement of information; these organizations consistently search their environment for any potential surprises (see Feldmann and March, 1988).

What I have said here about the relationship between knowledge and action in the knowledge society naturally also applies fundamentally to the professional occupations (Kurtz, 2005: 135–186). In contrast to this initial problem, however, professional work is also characterized by some particular uncertainties. The problem with professional interventions is that they always depend on the cooperation of the clients. No doctor can force patients to become healthy, and the priest cannot believe for the unbeliever or the believer. And even the teacher acting in class will not be able to solve the problems of his pupils for them in the sense of a technical expert, but he can only interpret the problems in a meaningful and representative way for them. He can make learning as pleasant as possible for the students through learning arrangements, but he cannot relieve them of learning – the pupils themselves have to learn. And finally, it is up to the students themselves whether they learn or not; and whether they resist – actively by disturbing the lessons or passively by dreaming or thinking of other things. In addition to this insecurity, which is bound to the person of the client, professional work is also characterized by a situation which aggravates this problem, because this work always takes place in the direct interaction between the professional and the client. It follows from this that professional practitioners must make the right decisions in the here and now of communication among those present in a context-sensitive manner. And they must do this even if they do not have the optimal knowledge for the situation.

It is to be assumed that the problems of professional work in relation to the person of the clients and the work situation of interaction are of course also the essential uncertainty factors in the school class, though they appear here in a more complex form. The first difference is obvious: while in the established professions of doctors and lawyers, for example, the case reference is usually the individual client, teachers always deal with a large group of students. However, there is now another aspect which distinguishes teachers’ work from the traditional professions: while you go to doctors and lawyers because you have a problem and hope for a solution to your case from the experts, in the pedagogical context the problems only arise when the child becomes a pupil. Ultimately, school is always a forced situation, which naturally influences many of the problems that arise there. Assuming this, I would like to draw attention in the following to some uncertainties in school teaching that every teacher automatically has to deal with, namely situativity, the deficit of understanding and the complexity of interaction.

Situativity: imagine the beginning of a school lesson. The teacher comes into the classroom in which the pupils are occupied with their own interests and perhaps do not even notice the teacher, introduces the subject of the lesson and hopes that the pupils may also participate constructively. Now, of course, everyone knows that such beginnings, in particular, can be the most difficult situations in teachers’ work. Since school lessons can only be started as an interaction between teacher and students, the teacher is faced with the initial problem of motivating the whole class for the teaching topic, despite the different interests of the individual students. This does not even include the kind of problem schools that are discussed in the media. Even in entirely unproblematic classes, students can respond to the teacher’s imagination in one way or another, and only in a very few cases will they fully meet the teacher’s expectations. So teaching situations are uncertain for the very reason that one can never actually plan them down to the last detail. No matter how well prepared the teacher may be for the lesson, the lesson can slip into an unwanted direction at any time. In such situations, teachers have to act spontaneously, which of course always means that they have to act unprepared. Ultimately, everything is decided in the here and now of interaction among those present.

Even without always having a sufficient knowledge base, the teacher must always make the right decisions in the classroom situation in a context-sensitive manner. Whether teachers usually do that is another question. In any case, they will often use the traditional means that the school organization has given them – the power to define the situation. However, of course, this does not have to work – it is uncertain – and the teachers of problem classes should at least be aware of this. From this perspective, the interaction system of school teaching can be described as a highly random system. All attempts at planning and controlling school instruction can only ever provide a structural framework which will only fill with life in the situation.

Deficit of understanding: in every school class there is usually another problem without teachers having to be aware of it or even having a way to prevent it. Physically present students can be mentally entirely elsewhere – with their friends, their domestic problems or anticipation of the evening television program. Of course, this mental absence does not have to be permanent. And it cannot be ruled out that these students will still be able to follow the lessons more or less, and give the right answers if necessary. However, something happens here that indeed occurs less frequently in other professional interventions – such as with a doctor – namely that you have more important things in your head than following the professional practitioner.

The theoretical problem behind this at this point is that no consciousness can understand another consciousness; that is, there can be no conscious connection between the consciousness of one person and that of another. This means that consciousness can only operate within its boundaries and cannot connect to the operations (thoughts and ideas) of another consciousness. Because these can only be conscious of the own consciousness itself: the consciousness or the psychic system is an autopoietic system (see Luhmann, 1995: 218–221, 262–267). Thus it is inconceivable that one consciousness could communicate with another consciousness. The teacher in class, for example, can perceive that the student or students perceive his behavior but he cannot perceive how the students perceive this, because the processes of the student’s consciousness are invisible to the teacher. He can only assume that a so-called good student thinks correctly in his sense. How the student came to his mind remains a black box for the teacher. And the insinuation of the teacher to know at the moment what the student is thinking is only the thought of the teacher and thus an operation of his consciousness system.

Pedagogy likes to talk about the pupil as a whole person but, in the end, it treats its clients in school teaching as what the mathematician and cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster (1987) calls trivial-machines. This is done by always allowing only one or a limited number of possible outputs (answers from the pupils) to a particular input (e.g. a question from the teacher). The self of the student (e.g. the temporary mental absence) is faded out from the normal teaching process. And so it was only through this reduction of the complexity of teaching that it was possible to at least rudimentarily realize the postulate of the plannability of education and teaching formulated by Johann Friedrich Herbart (1964a, 1964b). Of course, the pupils are not trivial-machines, but – to continue the terminology of cybernetics – rather self-reference machines (Luhmann, 1987). These psychical systems, however, are reduced in the communication of the teaching situation to certain persons acting as addressees of this communication. For pedagogy, this can also be interpreted as an attempt to solve its technology problem.

Complexity of interaction: it is also complicated by the fact that teachers, in contrast to doctors and lawyers, not only have to deal with individual clients, but always have to act with a large group of students and take into account the complexity of the interaction. Lessons are highly complex organizationally framed interaction systems. The teacher has to observe the progress of the lesson, intervene if necessary or leave it at that, evaluate the students’ performance and at the same time keep an eye on what else is happening. He is confronted with the problem of not being able to address each student individually at the same time: one student is interviewed, but what happens in the meantime with the other students? Do they remain in the teacher’s field of vision? He must, therefore, find forms of lingering for the other pupils who are not taken into consideration by him in the current situation (Markowitz, 1986). These students are released from direct observation. However, they should not disappear into the filing system and be forgotten, but they must be involved again in time in the observation of the teacher. The problem for the teacher here is that he has to consider all those present. While of course many interactions can be imagined in society where those present are not addressed in communication (such as waiters in better restaurants), the situation is fundamentally different in the interaction system of school teaching: present students are always included in the communication, even when they should be asleep, and probably especially then.

Of course, you can also describe the situation from the students’ point of view: one student is asked, and what do the other students do at the same time? Do they pay attention to the painstakingly struggling student, to the teacher waiting for an answer; do they hope not to be involved in the interaction themselves, or are their thoughts already on the coffee break? One can, therefore, see here that the teaching situation is characterized by simultaneously occurring psychical and social system references. And this does not exactly facilitate the teacher’s actions, for he cannot know what direct and indirect reactions he triggers in the individual pupil and at the same time in the other pupils (see Dreeben, 1970: 52). And this precisely is what is meant by the diagnosis of a technology deficit in school with which Niklas Luhmann and Karl Eberhard Schorr attracted attention in pedagogy almost four decades ago (see Luhmann and Schorr, 1982). The thesis is that, due to the complexity of the teaching constellation, there can be no safe technology at all. In this sense, pedagogy would always operate with a skill that one cannot, and would, therefore, be well advised to adjust to dealing with uncertainty – that is, to making decisions without sufficiently secure knowledge bases. ¹⁰

These uncertainties described here, however, are not only relevant for the form of action, but they also say something about the structure of the educational system itself. Each function system of modern society is characterized by particular uncertainties, but only in the systems in which the classical professions have established themselves do the uncertainties of interaction also become the uncertainty of the respective function system. These systems are first and foremost the systems of health, law and religion. However, one can also add here the educational system, and with restrictions the system of social help (see Kurtz, 2006). Here we are dealing with a group of systems that differ fundamentally in their structure from other systems and are characterized by a particular form of uncertainty. The distinguishing feature addressed here, is the form of inclusion; that is, the question of how people participate in social communication. Inclusion in modern society then means the fact that each function system provides for a specific form of inclusion for all members of society (see Luhmann, 1997: 618–634). Such a form of inclusion could be either performance or audience roles; for example, politicians/voters in the political system or teachers/students in the educational system. It is true that in modern society not everyone can participate in all function systems in the form of performance roles since, as a rule, we exercise only one occupation. However, in the form of audience roles, everyone can be included in all function systems; for example, as a voter, consumer or patient.

However, how the audience is included differs from system to system. We can make a rough distinction between the function systems in which the participation of the audience takes the form of a professional treatment of the problems of individual people – that is, the systems of health, law, religion, education and social help – and the systems in which it is not first the processing of problems of individual people (see Kurtz, 2000b). Following Rudolf Stichweh (1988), one might think of: (a) the form of inclusion as a quantitative mass phenomenon of the systems of art, politics, economy and mass media; (b) the indirect inclusion of science; but also (c) the inclusion via reciprocal performance and audience roles in family and love situations. There it is not first about the problem of dealing with personal problems, but, in the family, the person himself or herself as a person is the topic of communication.

In this sense, professions will only be assigned to the first group of systems: namely, precisely those function systems that are characterized by a fundamental interaction dependency. But not to be misunderstood here: of course, this does not mean that there would be no interaction in other systems or that bank employees could read our thoughts. Interactions or interaction systems can be found in every area of society, in every function system, every organization and network. But while systems such as the political system are not necessarily dependent on interaction, in which the administration of political power by politicians and the voting of parties and politicians by voters can be exercised very well in separate situations, the interaction between present experts and clients in the systems of education, law, health, religion and social help has become a fundamental component of the respective systems. Besides, it is not only a matter of continuing the system’s communications, but also of intervening in the persons, their bodies and structures of consciousness. Communication here is only successful if people change, if they believe again or even more strongly, are healed and educated. And the uncertainties occurring during these problem workings also mark the uncertainty of the respective interaction-dependent function system.

Concluding remarks

Now, after I have presented three examples of a sociological observation of the educational system with the question of the form of the educational system, its significance for the inequality structure of modern society and the problem of uncertain action, I will return briefly to the initial distinction between self-description and outside description at the end of my reflections. The first thoughts on such a distinction can already be found in Durkheim, who, in contrast to the action theory of education (‘théorie pratique’) observed in France during the Third Republic, aimed for a sociologically substantiated general educational science (see Durkheim, 2005b). The théorie pratique would be an aspect of what Luhmann calls the self-description of the educational system (see Luhmann, 2002: 168–203). Also, the distinction between self-description and outside description, which is used in this article, goes back to Luhmann. ¹¹

Sociology takes a strictly external observation perspective and has produced descriptions of that which the reflection theories of the function systems have already presented as self-descriptions. Sociology itself cannot be primarily allocated to any one function system of society. It is, so to speak, the reflection theory of the whole of society. Thus, sociology describes a reality that has always already been described by other theories (Bauman, 2000; Touraine, 1974) without having committed itself in advance to a positive reference to the described system and its binary codes (key differentiations). Nevertheless, Luhmann (1991) has repeatedly stressed that sociology is not able to take up the perspective of a first-order world observer, who knows what is right for the described system – even if representatives of a critical sociology claim to do just that. Rather, sociology functions as a second-order form of observation, which observes observations and reveals blind spots of that which has been described, without being protected from its own forms of blindness. Hence, the differentiation between self-description and outside description does not refer to a hierarchy between the disciplines: sociology does not hold the position of the last observer described in Michael Power’s (1997) Audit Society, as sociology also finds its external observer, which judges its success – for instance, politics informed by the mass media or, in our case, the educational system and its self-descriptions.