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Rich and I thought helpful conversation in the morning session about the unhappy student violence that Deidre and Tammi wrote about. It does indeed have to do with "distributed control", the notion that there really isn't anybody in charge in many systems (ranging from the nervous system to social groups), that what happens results instead from interactions among the various elements involved. What this implies, in turn, is that one can't hold a particular element (or person or institution) responsible. Instead, all elements (people, institutions) are simultaneously responsible.

That shouldn't, of course, be read fatalistically, as saying no one is responsible. What it actually says (in social contexts) is that we are all responsible, in one way or another, and it is the responsiblity of all of us, in whatever different ways we can, to prevent from happening things we don't want to have happen. Its not enough to blame "culture"; "culture" is something for which we're all responsible and which we can (should) all work to change.

It seems to me this all has direct relevance to the classroom as well. It suggests that among the things we should be doing is helping students learn how to live in a distributed system, since that seems to well characterize the world we live in. And that in turn means that we should be helping students acquire the wherewithal to not only deal with the world as it is but to be effective causal agents in changing it. Students need not only to learn what is but also that what is can be changed, that the present is not the future. They need to acquire a sense of possibility, to become empowered to be effective shapers of their own futures and of our collective world.

For more on these themes, see Social Organization as Applied Neurobiology: The Value of Stories and Story Creation.