“Renaissance in Person” by Rick Steves

From what we know, formal education, in other words, the practice of a group of students learning together in a designated space, has existed since ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient India, and ancient China. Education systems flourished differently according to the culture and place it existed in. After all, nothing is produced in a vacuum. In Western Europe, cathedral schools flourished during the Early Middle Ages from as early as the 500’s CE, while in the Islamic world madrassa’s (Arabic word for “school”) flourished from the emphasis on knowledge. Madrassa’s were separate from the mosques, where learning and religious activities were conducted.

Yet education was not accessible to all levels of people in society until the 19th society. The industrial revolution led to a rise in demand for education and an educated workforce. Education became available to the poor masses, producing a prototype for the modern global education system existing today.

State-owned education originated in 19th century Prussia (today’s Germany). After the Prussian army was defeated by Napoleon, the Prussian aristocrats installed the first ever compulsory education system, believing their defeat was rooted in lack of education, or discipline.

Gradually, education underwent a series of global synchronization, which can be understood through three main peaks of expansion: the Colonial Era, the World War, and the Cold War.

Education Systems Today

There is a fundamental crisis in our global education system. Today’s global education systems are primarily designed in the form of disciplinary learning. This method of disciplinary learning constrains the learner into a number of commandment that must be the underlying basis and start towards analysing and examining the subject matter within that discipline.

Let us look at the topic of war. War has always been a part of the human condition, and so, if history has taught us anything, it is that wars will continue to be a part of societies. Which discipline should be used to study war?

An International Relations student would examine war from its perspective on nation-states, how they engage in intra-state and inter-state wars, preventable measures for war, post-war paradigms, how wars impact and shape the nature of global political relationships. Meanwhile, a sociology professor would examine war from a macrolevel level, the patterns of war making, including how societies engage in warfare, the meaning that war has in society, and the relationship between state structure and war making. A historian would examine war from a historical point of view, simply an archival take on the list of wars, its impact on history, and is beneficial to all other disciplines. A political scientist would collect and analyse the data of wars to extract plausible conclusions. An anthropological perspective of war and violence may focus on the sub-group of the military – their norms, values, and so on. An economical approach would reveal patterns and conclusions regarding the relationship between the economy and wartimes- whether this be a correlative or cause-and-effect relationship. Linguistics and/or English Literature would focus on examining the roles of propaganda and language in warfare. Psychology would shed light on what are the psychological causes and effects of warfare.

In order to attain the most holistic understanding of the subject matter, there needs to be an analysis of war from each of these disciplines. The International Relations student would end up having a completely different perspective on war than the Sociology student, and so on and so forth. What if you put them all in a room- how much could they learn from each other, wouldn’t the collective outcome of all their perspectives and methods of analysing and examining the same subject of war lead to a more holistic understanding and therefore beneficial and useful in application to, for example, finding and implementing solutions to post-war conflict or in methods of preventing interstate or intrastate wars?

Revolutionising Pedagogy

The concept of interdisciplinary studies has its origins in the 18th century, today it is most widely seen in America’s liberal arts colleges. As American educational reformer and philosopher John Dewey wrote in his The School and Society book, Chapter 3, “Waste in Education”:

“We do not have a series of stratified earths, one of which is mathematical, another physical, another historical, and so on. All studies grow out of relations in the one great common world.”

Therefore, “all studies are naturally unified”.

This argument pushed for changes in mainstream pedagogy through the likes of John Dewey, Ralph Tyler, and Benjamin Bloom through enabling a more interdisciplinary-curriculums to exist, today it is far from being the primary form of education systems provided to children.

This would require collaboration amongst educators. Indeed, it is more than implementing changes in how students select their topic of study for university, but indeed, a revolution of the very nature of how education systems are set up to examine the world around us. In order to ensure collaboration of professionals within their respective fields, talks and meetings should be set up across cities and in university programs to first introduce this concept of an interdisciplinary education and its importance to understanding what is, naturally, a variant world that requires variant disciplines to study it.

In this way, students would be able to build their own interdisciplinary pathway. This would be done by choosing their own pathway to examine the subject matter. For example, in order to study global warming- anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and geologists would need to come together and share ideas and lenses to examining the subject of global warming.

An interdisciplinary approach to education would also revolutionize the student’s role in the process. Promoting John Dewey’s criticism of the student as a passive-learner, this would instead promote the student as an active participant in a back-and-forth process with the teacher. This would open an entire new area of thought, for solutions to conflict, new ways of thinking by looking at traditional topics that have been studied in a more rigid and constraining manner.