The essays in this book all deal with a question which, in our view, has so far received insufficient attention in work that aims to explore the significance of complexity theory for education. 1 This is the question of the politics of complexity. Whereas a lot has been written about curriculum, pedagogy and learning, relatively little has been said directly about the ways in which complexity theory might help us to engage with questions concerning the politics of education and about how we might account for the politics of this engagement itself. We take “politics” here in the broad sense of having to do with questions of value andpower. For us it is obvious that value and power play a central role in all educational endeavours. In so far as we can see education as havingto do with ways of directing, structuring and evaluating human learning— bearing in mind that human learning is not a natural phenomenon but itself has to be understood as a construct—and in so far as we can see education as having to do with ways in which we direct, structure and evaluate the learning of others, questions of value and power are simply inevitable. Education opens uppathways and opportunities but also, and often at the very same time, limits, reduces and even closes down ways of doing and being (see Mollenhauer, 1983). Education, after all, always involves choices. Those who engage in the justification of educational choices often do so using a language of values, whereas those who engage in research on the ways in which education actually opens up and closes down often do so using a language of power. We see these as two sides of the same coin, as we do not think that “opening up” isnecessarily good or educationally desirable or that “narrowing down” is necessarily bad or educationally undesirable. What is far more important is to acknowledge that in education both “opening up” and “narrowing down” involve the exertion of power and in this sense can be said to be political.