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?
I love Go Set A Watchman (GSAW). I enjoy GSAW as a book, but I love it ever more as a phenomenon. From the story of how the manuscript was discovered, the speculation on whether or not Harper Lee was forced to publish it, the debate on whether it should or shouldn’t be published, to the discussions surrounding racial tensions dealt in the book, everything surrounding GSAW is unprecedented.
The reverse chronological timeline of the writing of GSAW and To Kill A Mockingbird (TKAM) versus their publications is the trickiest, because it colors the interpretation of the story and its characters. Consequently, it generates so many conversations and fascinating, enjoyable articles.
Before Go Set A Watchman
I had long neglected the skill of reviewing literary fiction. I can say, however, that I read GSAW with fresh perspective because I did not have much attachment to TKAM or its beloved character, Atticus Finch.
When I read TKAM in middle or high school in Indonesia, I had vague concepts of the cultural background from which the story emerged. My English was in early development, so the language, culture, and the world that the novel described were entirely foreign to me. I had no idea what Maycomb, Alabama represented nor was I aware of the cultural differences that existed in America.
My shallow view was essentially this: people said it was a good book and Atticus Finch was a good guy. He said something about picturing ourselves in another person’s shoes.
The Comparison
With a phenomenon like GSAW—a ‘sequel’ after 55 years of its ‘original’—it’s hard not to engage in comparisons. To me, however, the comparison between TKAM and GSAW both makes and doesn’t make sense. In the literary sense, the comparison means little since GSAW was not intended to be published as TKAM was. It was unfinished, in a way, so of course the result is less compelling and less polished than TKAM.
Moreover, after TKAM, anything that Harper Lee would have published would most likely be less compelling because of this reason. A spectacular performance, by regression to the mean, is likely to be followed by a comparatively ‘worse’ performance, even though the subsequent may still be good work.
What makes sense, though, is the comparison between the characterization of Atticus Finch and Jean Louise (Scout), the two prominent characters, in both books. But since I don’t remember TKAM, I can’t make any comparison, escaping this discussion altogether after writing three paragraphs on it…
Complexity
What I like the most about GSAW is the complexity of Atticus Finch as a character. While Atticus is largely heralded as the hero of TKAM, GSAW does not have staple heroes or villains. Jean Louise, as the vehicle of the narrative, is naturally a sympathetic character, yet her reactions to discovering her father’s attitudes toward blacks are a mix of righteous indignation and immaturity. Atticus, all the while subscribing to the superiority of his race, still exudes some wisdom in the handling of his daughter’s outrage. In the words of Uncle Jack (Atticus’ brother), “[Atticus] was letting you break your icons one by one. He was letting you reduce him to the status of a human being.”
The heart of the novel is the weaning of Jean Louise’s conscience—and perhaps also the readers’—off Atticus’. To this weaning process, both parental figures are proud of Jean Louise’s clash with them, even though they differ in opinions.
All taken from the words of Uncle Jack,
“Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious.”
“. . . now you, Miss, born with your own conscience, somewhere along the line fastened it like a barnacle onto your father’s. As you grew up, when you were grown, totally unknown to yourself, you confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings— I’ll grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes ’em like all of us. You were an emotional cripple, leaning on him, getting the answers from him, assuming that your answers would always be his answers.”
“When you happened along and saw him doing something that seemed to you to be the very antithesis of his conscience— your conscience—you literally could not stand it.” Go Set A Watchman, Chapter 18.
The Questions
What is the message of GSAW? Is it about freedom in opinions? Is it about the handling of familial relationships? Is it arguing a balance between idealism and realism?
I’m not sure what the novel’s intents are. Then again, the question of the author’s intent regarding GSAW is a tricky one—we may never know what Harper Lee thought when she wrote this manuscript. Plus, GSAW is too short of a story to handle the questions that arise post-confrontation between Atticus and Jean Louise.
What matters, though, is us, the readers, having these discussions now in 2015 vis-à-vis racism and discrimination. While GSAW does not provide resolutions to the coexistence between the two attitudes that Jean Louise and Atticus represent, we must. What are we to do with the Jean Louises and Atticuses in our society? How are we to live with differing and conflicting consciences?
Having a hero such as Atticus Finch being brought down to “the status of a human being” is disorienting to many, but it is a powerful device to disrupt the mind of a society. Do we now tolerate, sympathize, or discard him? Can we, should we, in his TKAM words, “consider things from his point of view,” “climb into his skin and walk around in it.” As a society, we see Atticus’ views in GSAW as objectionable. But what do we do with the human being?
Harper Lee does not answer these questions for us and she’s not obligated to do so. We, individually and collectively, must discover them for ourselves. Thanks to GSAW, we’re talking about it.
I love the NYT! More often than not, I get that satisfied feeling after reading its well-written articles. NYT reviews are, of course, highly esteemed, so you can get good quality picks from its various lists and reviews.
This is the website of Shane Parrish, a writer and entrepreneur who calls himself a wisdom seeker. His posts have been featured repeatedly on TIME. His materials are excellent, focusing on books that teach you how to think and make decisions better. Of all the genres out there in the blogosphere, this is my favorite!
The Books & Fiction section of the New Yorker contains excellent, enlightening, and entertaining essays concerning books, the book culture, and related social issues. If you’re a bibliophile, this is a must-follow.
I find their essays are more philosophical in nature. The website features reading materials that are not necessarily on the current best-seller lists, which is great.
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
If you’re looking for sites that review all kinds of genres, these feeds can be entertaining. They spread their nets wide, so the articles come in droves. It’s hard (and not necessary) to keep up with all of their posts, so pick and choose which ones will be worth your time!
I personally use Feedly to keep up with blogs and various news feeds. If you don’t have it already, try it! You can read unlimited NYT articles for free!!
I love Go Set A Watchman (