For some time now I have wanted to reflect on exactly why I think it is important to integrate the arts and the sciences in undergraduate education.
Researchers, journalists, writers and thinkers around the globe are more productive than ever before. Estimates are that the amount of new information is more than doubling every ten years. Assessing and analyzing even a tiny fraction of the current global output – to say nothing of knowledge generated in earlier years – is a daunting challenge. The addition of different cultural perspectives, new academic disciplines, countless discoveries and new ideas, and the massive expansion of the world’s university systems and research capabilities have made it impossible for even the most devoted and engaged citizen to stay on top of anything but a small fraction of the knowledge, information, ideas and insights now in circulation.
The result, not surprisingly, has been the development of academic and personal specialization within the post-secondary education system. Increasingly people know more and more about less and less. Students are expected to specialize early, often receiving little or no introduction to the insights and ideas generated in another part of the academy. Subsequently many students graduate from university with a highly fragmented understanding of the knowledge available in the world and few strategies for coping with its complexity.
“What is needed?”
Ironically, our complex, inter-connected world requires more integration of knowledge, not less, and more generalists to work with the specialists now graduating from our universities. Scientists need to understand the dictates of national politics and the ethical parameters within which new discoveries must be developed. Cultural understanding, in the form of language, literature, and popular culture, has to be integrated into efforts to explain regional, national, and international social movements. Understanding the social dynamics of technological change requires knowledge of both social structures and the intricacies of contemporary technologies. The myriad influences of globalization – ecological change, cultural diffusion, political, and economic integration – require many different perspectives. Citizens seeking to work in this rapidly changing and complex intellectual environment require the skill of integration and the ability to work with and between bodies of disciplinary knowledge.
We need to rekindle enthusiasm for intellectual integration. We need to encourage students to read between the disciplines and to develop the special skills of synthesis. We need to revive the generalist approach to personal growth and intellectual development.
Quest University Canada is inspired by precisely this kind of thinking. I am convinced that an education based on the science of synthesis and integration, learning across cultures and academic disciplines, will prepare our graduates very well for the challenges and opportunities of an interconnected, interdependent world. And that’s why I think it is so important to integrate the arts and the sciences.
I would like to hear other’s views on this great challenge we face in preparing students for life in the 21st century. What do you think about the direction of education for the future? And by the way, a warm welcome to dialogue at Quest!
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5 comments:
I believe that you have indeed posted a key question for our age, one that I even have pondered at length for the future of my own career. Having studied earth systems science (including climate change which integrates pysical and biological sciences) as well as evolution and cognitive ecology at McGill and SFU, I gradually came to see connections not just in how the earth changes and maintains homeostasis, but even more apparently disparate connections, such as how our perceptions (psychology) colour the way we live in and treat each other and our environments.
Producing well rounded students is often a goal of universities, but to truly form an integrated learning envrionment that bridges specialized streams is a more unique endeavour. My hat's off to you on taking up this challenge.
Aside from universities that offer interdisciplinary degrees, such as in complex systems, until now, one of the few universities that I saw that took a holistic approach was Schumacher College in the UK, albeit with a sustainability focus. They even have what is called a 'holistic MSc'. I even considered attening Schumacher, but considering some of the artsy courses, wondered how accepted it would be by other institutions and researchers. I set out questioning professors and researchers from Stanford and MIT to Cambridge and Oxford, and interestingly received the best responses from the new world, Standford and MIT, who found the Schumacher approach to be progressive, needed and exciting.
In the end, I decided not to go, because I have children who very much want to stay in BC, so I am glad that BC is joining this cutting edge trend and look forward to seeing what Quest will bring to the education table. I hope that you eventually have an astrobiology or complex systems department, or even your own version of a holistic post graduate degree! :)
Finally, having worked coordinating multidisciplinary environmental projects with UBC, SFU and DFO I understand first hand the challenges and requirements of multidisciplinarity in the real world that graduates face. In fact, one of the main reasons why the recently created Pacific Salmon Forum accepted as its first proposal one that I worked on, was because of our multidisciplinary and inclusive approach regarding recently hotly debated sea lice issues.
When you have global issues that are of cultural, economic and environmental concern, you need informed, effective and versatile individuals to bring harmony to the situation who understand how to bring people from different perspectives together. If you can generate such skills in your graduates, you will have accomplished something wonderful, because often generalists face a challenge, which is to be taken seriously by the specialists. So if you can create generalists with the skills to bring the specialists together, I think you will be onto something powerful. You may even want to consider offering mediation or conflict management as an elective or stream in this regards.
Maria R.
West Vancouver, BC
David,
How much of arts, visual and performing, though also musical and literary, is incorporated into the Quest curriculum?
I attend Bennington, where President Liz Coleman comments that one of the revolutionary ideas of the college back in the 30's was to put the arts on the same level as the humanities and the sciences.
As a recent graduate from Mount Allison University (a small liberal arts university in New Brunswick), I constantly ask myself the question: why did i go to a liberal arts university to study philosophy? one possible answer is that liberal arts education frees me from living in divisions: "I am what you are not; I have seized what was beyond your reach; I am something, you are nothing.”(Merton) Instead, liberal arts education allows me to live authentically and individually by liberating myself for painful duties of acting in a way i am expected to, of admiring what everyone eles admires...of saying what I really don't think...and philosophy, as a core subject of liberal arts education has taught me another important thing: it is a danger to think oneself as a "knower"...in contrast, a healthy condition for growing is when you feel lost and confused, yet still eager to find out why things are happening in certain ways...that's how you gain wisdom---by constant questioning what you hear and you are told...above are some of my broken thoughts about liberal arts education...my last point is that: although I am facing various suspicious attitudes from employers in my job search, most are directly related to my major in philosophy and my degree from a liberal arts univeristy, i still believe that going to a small liberal arts school is one of the best choices I have ever made.
---Jiashu Fang
As a recent graduate from Mount Allison University (a small liberal arts university in New Brunswick), I constantly ask myself the question: why did i go to a liberal arts university to study philosophy? one possible answer is that liberal arts education frees me from living in divisions: "I am what you are not; I have seized what was beyond your reach; I am something, you are nothing.”(Merton) Instead, liberal arts education allows me to live authentically and individually by liberating myself for painful duties of acting in a way i am expected to, of admiring what everyone eles admires...of saying what I really don't think...and philosophy, as a core subject of liberal arts education has taught me another important thing: it is a danger to think oneself as a "knower"...in contrast, a healthy condition for growing is when you feel lost and confused, yet still eager to find out why things are happening in certain ways...that's how you gain wisdom---by constant questioning what you hear and you are told...above are some of my broken thoughts about liberal arts education...my last point is that: although I am facing various suspicious attitudes from employers in my job search, most are directly related to my major in philosophy and my degree from a liberal arts univeristy, i still believe that going to a small liberal arts school is one of the best choices I have ever made.
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