Taking a point of departure in the paradoxical fact that the increase in educational knowledge leads to an increase in uncertainty for educational organisations, this article explores how uncertainty and contingency have increasingly become an integral part of school governance. The article draws on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of ‘World Society’ as a functional differentiated society providing a range of different symbolic media for educational organisations. To trace the increase in the complexity of governing, we provide a historical account of the shifting couplings between schools and function systems. We show how the school becomes linked to an increasing number of symbolic media so that education becomes only one out of many other concerns. The article studies the consequences these shifting couplings have for how schools are governed and how they are expected to self-manage their relationship to different function systems.

The article adds to existing studies of how education has become more and more differentiated with the argument that this has also led to new forms of couplings between schools and the education system with a number of important implications for the teaching profession.

从一个矛盾的事实出发，即教育知识的增加导致教育组织的不确定性增加，本文探讨了不确定性和偶然性如何日益成为学校治理不可或缺的一部分。本文借鉴了尼古拉斯·卢曼（Niklas Luhmann）的“世界社会”理论，认为它是一个功能分化的社会，为教育组织提供了一系列不同的符号媒体。为了追溯治理复杂性的增加，我们提供了有关学校与职能系统之间不断变化的耦合关系的历史说明。我们展示了学校如何与越来越多的象征性媒体建立联系，从而使教育仅成为众多其他问题中的一种。

这篇文章增加了关于教育如何变得越来越差异化的现有研究，并认为这也导致了学校与教育系统之间新形式的耦合，这对教学行业产生了许多重要的影响。