ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the systems approach as it relates to social planning. In exploring its processes of understanding, controlling and communicating, it looks at distinct but related disciplines as aspects of the common language and also at the interrelationship between education and planning. Amongst modern sociologists, Talcott Parsons has been highly influential in developing the notion of the system. He has examined specifically the element of social relationship in systems consisting of interacting persons: society as a whole, then, as subsystems, such things as committees and families. Education can be studied as a social system, with the school as a significant sub-system. Between human beings the highly important process is an interaction which we call communication; and the complicated patterns of interaction in society form a communications network. This communication, which is so critically important to us, has been created in certain inorganic systems, too.
