INTERDISCIPLINARY WORK: A YEAR OF SYNTHESIS IN EDUCATION

by Terry W. Williams, PhD

Interdisciplinary work, an old concept, is in urgent need of a new explanation. This need is in the present for future expansion of our social and scientific educational systems. As a career scientist in the biomedical field fort he past 23 years, I can attest that there is a serious problem of over-specialization in the sciences. And science is not alone. The humanities and liberal arts are enmeshed in a spiraling increase of specialty fields, with the result that within all fields of intellectual and artistic pursuit, colleagues are increasingly hard-pressed to keep up with the avalanche of new journals, new material, new knowledge and interpretations. And if this is the case with the educated and trained specialist, consider the effect of all this on the public, the many non-specialists, the Everyman for which our efforts as working scientists and creative thinkers are ultimately intended.

The problem of unprecedented output in scientific and artistic specialties and sub-specialties is a very serious, and even dangerous issue that we, as a developing global civilization, face. If we fail to quickly address and harmonize these problems within our developing multi-cultural framework, then we face an increasing "informational chaos" throughout our world community. The consequences of this, which we are actually witnessing right now in our daily lives, is a sort of wide-spread intellectual paralysis, which leads to our social inability to make the appropriate decisions which will help to insure our survival as a civilization.

The interdisciplinary approach to knowledge is an intuitively satisfying solution to the problems of over-specialization and narrowly defined specialist informational goals. Why? It is difficult to say, except that most creative thinkers have often recognized that the discoveries they make in their own field often shed light on solutions to problems in other fields. This arouses in the individual the feeling that there are "universal laws" at work, and that further, if we could discover these laws, then newer and more powerful discoveries can be made, which will in turn, elicit better solutions to problems. I think this type of intuitional sense is presently more concentrated in the artists, rather than in the scientist type of mentality. However, this may simply reflect a kind of "detail overload" in scientists, which seems to come with the territory in scientific research, rather than a fundamental difference between the hemispheric sides of the brain between the arts and science.

Evidence for an attenuated type of interdisciplinary approach to intellectual work is seen in the very structure of our educational system, both high and low. We teach, from first grade though college, a variety of subjects. The range of materials includes the sciences, languages, art, history, mathematics, humanities and social studies, and much more. But the obvious, glaring fact of all this is that how to connect and relate these diverse materials is never taught. It is taken for granted that students, somehow or other, on their own, will be able "to put it all together." Our system of education simply fails to teach people how to connect the materials from diverse subjects. It seems never to even have thought of it before. It automatically assumes that the student can do this easily for him/herself. This is a tragic mistake. A failure of the system which is so blatant, that it seems to reflect some sort of social intellectual incapacity, or even retardation.

This neglect on the part of our basic education system leaves our people "hanging" with increasing tons of material to rote memorize, and thereby to "get good grades," but without the slightest inkling of how these things actually stand in relationship which, in reality, is the most important thing to learn. Hence, it is not surprising that today we are being inundated by a flood of specialist literature of all sorts: material that often appears isolated and almost impossible, within the specialties themselves, to keep track of. A lack of the idea of relationship leads to more of the same in all fields.

Hence, I am calling for a new examination of the meaning of interdisciplinary work. Call it a new field of science if you will, which will serve as an essential, most-needed remedy to a problem that seems to have slipped by us all. This new science would encompass the "Study of Relationships," and provide a kinetic component within the educational system, which serves to move and explore new, undiscovered connections between specialist subjects. The starting point for this new science is the idea that "the world is One," that everything is interconnected; all lives, all matter, all energies. And at this point, it is interesting to note that this idea is actually a very old idea, expressed by the word "University, "which derives from the latin roots, uni, meaning, "one", and versus or vertere, meaning, "to turn toward." Hence, the basis of our educational system is founded on the fundamental concept of referring or turning to "one truth" or "one whole."

Suppose, for example, that in a student's senior year in high school and in his senior year in college, this entire year was spent in the study of how all the material learned in the previous years is interconnected, by using an interdisciplinary approach. By establishing a profound shift in the basis of our educational curriculum toward this "year of synthesis," we would be well on the way to learning how to re-connect our knowledge on the firm basis of the study of real relationships. Students trained and educated by this means would be able to see insights and grasp concepts that would make our present system of education look simplistic. Such a simple shift in our system would, over time, give rise to a real Renaissance in our thinking on every subject. New, more integrated sciences would come into being, new knowledge, and new solutions would be found to seemingly insuperable problems.

This is a single, but potentially effective project within the educational system to begin a new era in the world of interdisciplinary work. The necessity of our entire world situation demands an approach of this nature to the problems in many fields of human endeavor. Another candidate for such an approach is the environmental/ecological movement Probably in no other area is the idea of interdisciplinary work so critically needed at this moment. In fact, it could be that the future of ecology will turn out to be a model system upon which all other interdisciplinary projects will be based.

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