This article is the second of a series, titled Between Jerusalem and Athens. Read the first, third, fourth, fifth here and here, sixth here and here, and seventh.
True education means more than the pursual of a certain course of study – Ellen White
Once upon a Princeton semester, I journeyed from the corridors of the Engineering Quadrangle, through the Shapiro Walk, flanked between the glass-windowed, rooftop-gardened ORFE (Operations Research and Financial Engineering) building and the Engineering Library, past the Woodrow Wilson School, and entered the 1879 Hall, where I enrolled in a History of Science course.
I dare say few trod this path, for why would an engineer willingly “inflict” upon themselves the trouble of reading, discussing, and writing papers for a Humanities class, especially when it’s not required?
As for me, I was simply feeling exploratory. It is also worth mentioning that I suck at Humanities classes. I’m not particularly good at writing Humanities papers, I dread class discussions, and I lack the skill to ask the right analytical questions for the materials at hand.
Although the course title bore the word “Science,” the class felt worlds away from my daily reality over at the EQuad. It was philosophical, historical–for a lack of a better description–and naturally, I struggled, but managed, to keep up.
You could say it was a detour from my academic orbit.
The Siloed Education
What was most fascinating about this experience, however, was not how foreign the content of the class was to me. Instead, it was my full ignorance that the Philosophy department was housed in a building that I passed by almost every day. I had no idea about what took place in this space that I was familiar with.
Institutions of learning are architecturally organized by departments and disciplines. Each lives within their own space, with occasional crossing in some interdisciplinary efforts. This makes perfect sense in terms of collaboration efforts and administrative activities within the department, minimizing the travel time for frequent internal meetings between faculty members and the student bodies. For the sciences, it makes sense to build laboratory infrastructures in localized areas.
This architectural layout reflects the realities of modern day knowledge, which is segmented by disciplines. As a result, though, students rarely pass through buildings that are not their home departments. More importantly, students rarely interact with those in other fields, especially as they delve deeper into their majors in the latter years of undergraduate studies, and more so in graduate studies. It seems to me that the deeper we go into our academic pursuit, the more disconnected we are to others outside of our circuit.
Even though we occupy the same spaces, namely the university, our realities are tangential to each other, co-existing but barely touching,
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Assuming that everyone who reads this was born within the last 200 years, this separation of disciplines in education systems is all that we know. It is simply the way our world is organized, and it is hard to imagine an alternative.
The compartmentalization of knowledge, however, is a relatively recent construct in human history, designated to organize the growing body of academic knowledge during the last two centuries. Beginning in the early 19th century, following the Age of Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, and coinciding with the Industrial Revolution, the idea that specialties in a single area (whether in education or manufacturing processes) can produce much gain and efficiency took off.
The fruits of this compartmentalization have multiplied and reproduced spectacularly. Each field has discovered much depth and vastness in its subjects and the benefits are plentiful. Advances in health, medicines, and technologies had increased life expectancies; engineering practices empowered life conveniences and mass production of goods; economics and market understanding have incentivized development worldwide.
Yet, even with this vast body of knowledge, there are still problems that are difficult to address, partly because of the segmented nature of our expertise.
An Argument for Integration
Edgar Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, eloquently explains why these silos of knowledge are imperfect.
See the full interview here.
For one, it has troubles with addressing complex problems with the proper complexity. These are the ones with vast scope, like poverty, the inefficient distribution of food around the world, climate change, environmental degradation, pollution and waste, social justice issues, etc. By nature, these problems require the interplay of multiple disciplines.
Morin argues that there is a need to contextualize knowledge–historically, geographically–“inserting it into the whole [reality] to which it belongs.” For example, “economists who have developed a precise social science based on calculations, are powerless in the face of crises” because humans don’t just obey economic laws, but also many other laws beyond economics.
In a particular poignant sentence, Morin says, “While calculation is useful, it cannot comprehend the suffering and the human problems of our lives.” You cannot calculate human suffering.
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The tendency to tell single narratives–seeing and slicing a problem exclusively with a singular point of view–is, I think, stemmed from these separations of disciplines. We don’t know what we don’t know, so how can pivot our perspective?
Does this, then, cause us to miss opportunities at solving complex problems with cohesive solutions that would not solve one and create another problem?
What if, the assumption that learning needs to take place in only one department is challenged? Can education be multifaceted? And what kind of fruits would it produce in society?
Perhaps the more pertinent questions are those posed to the individual. How can we be conscientious learners, who can both learn and contextualize knowledge? How do we make sure, while we are submerged in our respective fields, that we remember the full reality, that life is greater than just our world?
To be continued…
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