Part of the problem with education is students do not know what relevance many topics they study have for them. I remember throughout grade and high school that I thought math to be utterly unimportant and irrelevant to anything I was ever going to do. And throughout most of my early years I had wanted to be a scientist. How could teachers have allowed me to think that math was not important? I did not really learn math was important until I took chemistry in high school. It was only then that I truly understood fractions for the first time. And, even though I loved to read, I thought literature pointless (it did not help that in high schools they seem to go out of their way to find the most boring literature available – I learned how wonderful literature was in college, when we were made to read books and stories that were actually interesting). Literature had nothing to do with biology, after all, and that was what I was going to go into. This attitude is not unique to me or to high school – it prevails in most students, and through college.
The disciplinary approach to teaching is breaking down. Students are siphoned into what they enjoy, and these same students then ignore everything else, complaining about anything that intrudes on the one thing they want to learn. This kind of hyper-specialized education is fine if all you want to produce is worker bees. But if you want creative thinkers, those who can come up with new things – the kind of people who will make more wealth and produce more value in and for the world – then disciplinary-only educations will not work.
What we need is a truly interdisciplinary education. We need interdisciplinary thinking, interdisciplinary classes, and interdisciplinary education. Only an interdisciplinary education will allow students to see how disciplines are interrelated. Only an interdisciplinary education will create interdisciplinary thinkers who can create more value in and for the world. We need chemists who love Bach, biologists who love Goethe, businessmen who love Aristotle. We need philosophers who love biology and business and artists who love physics and economics. Only with an interdisciplinary education will we have people who think this way, across the disciplines, through the disciplines, complexifying their thought so new things can be thought. What would the world be like if our politicians actually knew and understood the economics of Ludwig von Mises, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the plays of Sophocles, the linguistics of Chomski, the novels of Kafka, chaos theory, systems theory, evolutionary theory, the poetry of William Blake, and ancient Greek history? Could interdisciplinary thinking finally give the country great statesmen instead of demagogues? Could an interdisciplinary education create more ethical businessmen, since they would understand that there is not a conflict between ethical action and profit? Imagine a businessman who knew the value of a dollar, of his workers, and of a van Gogh. Imagine what an interdisciplinary education would do for teachers. Wouldn’t it make them – teachers? How can teachers teach when they know nothing? Teachers more than anyone should be interdisciplinary. They should know and understand the reason for having an interdisciplinary education, to understand and know the connections between the disciplines, and be able to help their students understand the importance of all the disciplines for understanding any one of the disciplines.
What is interdisciplinarity? It is not multidisciplinarity, where we have just a hodgepodge. It is not having students doing writing exercises in math class, or quadratic equations in literature class. That does not show students how the disciplines are interrelated. To have an interdisciplinary education, students need to know the value of each of the disciplines, how they relate to each other, the history of the disciplines. Students do not know how modern science arose out of natural philosophy and religion. Misunderstandings of ideas such as entropy make people reject evolution on the argument that more complexity could not arise in an entropic universe, where everything is becoming more random (this is, incidentally, not quite what entropy is about). We need to teach students about systems and complexity and information, so they can see how all disciplines relate to one another. This will give students an interdisciplinary education. And they will need an interdisciplinary education if they want to have an edge in this increasingly interdisciplinary world.
2 comments:
My name is Marlon Witbooi. From what I can remember, between Grade 1 and Grade 3, my teachers attempted to explain the necessity of why we had to do the different things we did. For example, why you need to be able to read, write and count and also eat healthy and exercise.
But from Grade 4 onwards up until I graduated with my first Degree, generally, but not all, teachers, and then some lecturers would create the impression that their subject/module is the most important of the lot. It is mainly from this year while I'm pursuing my postgraduate qualification that I became aware of the interconnectedness and relevancy of my modules in aid of the other, which lead to the increased realisation of how different things are connected other than things academic related.
Now, when thinking about education from a functional perspective, functionalists believe that the educational systems are a key platforms for socialisation of the new generation, as they learn the values, norms, culture and rules of society.
When thinking about the education system it's clear that it could be explained by the division of labour. The division of labour, at its basic features, means that work is separated into tasks and each task given to a separate person, or a group of people. The functionality of the different subjects becomes apparent then in terms of preparing children for society and giving them the tools they need to function in society.
It is quite structural in nature giving boundaries to disciplines which give ground for specialization. People with these specialized knowledge capacities take specialized positions in society. Teachers then only do their part, limiting themselves and their teaching strictly to teaching of their subject, not giving the much needed reason why each subject is important or rather the relevance and interconnectedness of subjects and the overall development of students. Also, this functional structure also makes sure that several teachers keep their jobs and how new teachers get entrance into the system.
Teaching then becomes a task to complete, and what they teach then doesn't always become knowledge, but information to answer a question in a test and then to forget when you're done. Education is also highly influenced by the dominant political and economical trend of a country.
This is could be and is some of the reasons why I think interdisciplinary work is not highly favoured. For it to be contingent, and not just a project, the whole structure and belief system of society may need to change which is something that takes time.
Post a Comment