Organic vs mechanical metaphors

A couple of days ago, reading an Adult Education conference report, I discovered that there had been a question about a part of it entitled 'tools for education'. The challenge was whether we could find a more organic metaphor than the mechanical one employed there. I take it that the point is that 'tools' implicitly frame learners as machines and educators as mechanics. Or at least the classroom as a machine. There is an implication that the right application of tools and techniques will produce 'learning'. Of course it is more complex than that, and that is just the point. The kind of things that are complex are often organic. The point is that there isn't a simple input-output thing going on, rather several inputs running through a dynamical and interactive system producing a series of outputs which have statistical correlations but not inevitable ones.

Anyway, what organic metaphor could do the duty for what 'tools' attempts to capture and does so in a way that meaningfully captures something about the complex dynamical nature of the exercise of teaching and learning.

The only thing that I've managed to come up with is 'genes'; they are a simple finite set of things which combine to produce things of great complexity. However, they are not the only factor: we now know that they are affected in their expression by things like hormones and even other environmental factors. So while genes have a determinative role, they are not all that is at work.

Of course the difficulty may be that the metaphor is not immediately clear. 'Genes for education' doesn't sound like it's a metaphor yet. It tends to sound like it may be a literal statement about our genetic dispositions to learn.

So, back to the drawing board. Or do you think it could work? Or is there a better metaphor lurking out there?

Organic Organizational Design: "From our industrial age roots, organizations were thought to have clear boundaries and assumed an authoritarian, hierarchical pyramid like organizational structure. Our organizations reflected a mechanistic model. This was effective for the time since the need for responding to change was not as immediate. Access to information was not easy nor was the workforce as educated. Access to information and decision making was concentrated at the top. This authoritarian hierarchical model provided clarity, consistency, and control."