At first sight, the famous circle of chairs pretends that non-formal education is an orderly system, full of predictable harmony. What an illusion!

» Non-formal education is chaos at its best.

The contrast between the image and the core of nonformal learning is a wonderful illustration of the dialectics between order and chaos, harmony and disorder. And indeed, educators have much to gain from chaos theory.

In Greek mythology, the world wide web reveals to us, khaos meant “gaping void” or “nothingness” and was — at least by some — thought to be the primary source of all things.

In contemporary mathematics, chaos describes dynamical systems with a sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

More commonly, this is described as the butterfly effect, a term coined by mathematician and meterologist Edward Lorenz: ...

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