To some this may seem patently obvious but it’s worth repeating that, throughout history, those people we (in this case “Western Civilization”) hold in the greatest esteem are those that think in and about systems.
These days the best paid employees are CEOs, doctors, lawyers and software developers among many others. These people specialize in systems. CEOs are concerned with the systems of productivity and profitability. Doctors are concerned simultaneously with the body as a system but they are also responsible for the proper functioning of our health-care system. Lawyers provide the generative constraints on our social systems. Software developers construct virtual systems for interaction, commerce and information storage.
It is puzzling then that our education system, and in fact our society. Lacks any sort of operable understanding at a general level of how different kinds of systems are structured and how they function.
Globalization to many scholars is the symptom of a greater struggle between two opposing kinds of organizational structure - command-and-control hierarchies with decentralized networks. This struggle is manifested in many proverbial (and often literal) battlefields.
How then will we grapple with teaching a new generation about how systems work? Or will this knowledge by the purview only of an elite professional class of people lucky enough to have learned the concepts?