Tom, you say
({I've snipped you.}
>Specialists in areas are of great value as we see in medicine. But,
>medicine has also seen that the tendency to create sub specialties and
>sub-sub specialties grew at the expense of the general practioner. Now
>there is a reversal with a balance being achieved and a determination of
>how much micro management of medical knowledge makes sense.
>The same, it seems, would hold for academia where a new "scholarly"
>journal is being created at the drop of a couple of new theses that need
>to be in print,
>The same has occured in industry..
I still need your help, or someone's help, in seeing how these very real
phenomena relate to "interdisciplining" the college curriculum.
How would you change, say, the freshmen year curriculum, now typically
five courses a semester--English, Physics,Math, psyc or soc, and how would
these interdisciiplinary changes minimize or eliminate the things you've
written about that you and many others don't like?
I can't yet see the connection between our emphasis on specialization
(which accounts for our societal success, in my view) and
interdisciplinearity. Is it that folks believe if you integrated phyics,
sociology, and literature into a single interdisciplinary course those
taking it would be less interested in specializing in any of the
individual disciplines? Or less able to?
Steve
--Steve Eskow <dreskow@corp.webb.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>