Connecting the Dots in Education

Connecting the dots (Janadas Devan, SunTimes Think, 28/3, p34)

SunTimes carried a commentary by Janadas Devan on the fundamental questionsthat needed to be asked in the quest for a ‘holistic education’. Hecommented that all modern systems of knowledge were the product of intensespecialisation, which produced a tendency of the mind thinking in“hermetically sealed silos, among which there was little or nocommunication”. He noted there was little progress from the past attemptsof solving the problem of integrated education, by basing education onscience or alternatively on the humanities. He suggested adopting apragmatic approach in the quest for holistic education by asking questionswhich would require the coordination of different knowledge to answer andwhy we needed to know them.
I love knowing things. The more bizarre the fact, the more surprising thehistorical event, the more unusual the feeling or thought, the moreavariciously I collect them.
How do spiders make love? Well, there at the centre of her web, sits thefemale of the species, two or three times the size of her male lovers. Themale approaches the centre, drawn by the delicious perfume. At the heightof passion, after the male has deposited all its semen, the giant femaleturns around, and promptly devours the male.

What was James I's official title? Well, in 1616, after the English woncontrol of two spice islands in the Banda Sea, it was announced that JamesI, 'by the grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, isalso now by the mercy of God, King of Poolaway and Poolaroone' - Poolawayand Poolaroone being what the English then called Pulau Ai and Pulau Run,two tiny atolls in what is today Indonesia's Maluku Islands. The Englishfought many wars with the Dutch for control of the atolls, once consideredto be worth more than all of Scotland because of the nutmeg that grew onthem. The English finally renounced control of the islands in 1667, when,in the Treaty of Breda, they exchanged them, most unhappily andreluctantly, for New Amsterdam - which, of course, later became New York!

What is the most truthful thing that's been said about the relationsbetween the sexes? Well, plenty, no doubt, but consider this, a poementitled Bloody Men by Wendy Cope:
'Bloody men are like bloody buses -/ You wait for about a year/ And as soonas one approaches your stop/ Two or three others appear.'You look at them flashing their indicators,/ Offering you a ride./ You'retrying to read the destinations,/ You haven't much time to decide.'If you make a mistake, there is no turning back./ Jump off, and you'llstand there and gaze/ While the cars and the taxis and lorries go by/ Andthe minutes, the hours, the days.'
Science, history, literature - does knowing bits and pieces about these andmany other subjects make me a renaissance man, a polymath?

Well, if the criterion is sheer quantity, I might qualify as a polymath. Mymind is filled with loose intellectual change - pocketfuls of five-centbits of science, 10-cent bits of history and politics, 20-cent bits ofmusic and poetry.

But if the criterion is wisdom - the ability to build bridges amongdisparate fields of knowledge to arrive at an intellectually, emotionallyand spiritually adequate view of life and society - I'm most certainly nota renaissance man. I am, I suppose, capable, on my best days, of evokingthe odd 50-cent bit of insight - and once in a blue moon, perhaps even adollar-coin's worth. But whole bills of wisdom, alas, have always eludedme.

And this is not solely due to my personal inadequacies. All modern systemsof knowledge are the product of intense specialisation. We have noalternative but to specialise in order to acquire an adequate command ofparticular subjects. But the problem is, as necessary as specialisation is,it has produced what the mathematician and philosopher A.N. Whitehead oncereferred to as a 'celibacy of the intellect' - the tendency of the modernmind to exist in a series of hermetically sealed silos, among which thereis little or no communication.

Both scientists and men of letters have been aware since the 19th centuryof the difficulty of connecting the silos. T.H. Huxley, the biologist andeducator, called for a broad-based integrated education, but believedscience should provide the basis of its organisation. Matthew Arnold, thepoet and critic, called for the inclusion of science in education, butargued that only the humanities could provide the basis of integrating allknow-ledge, including science.
This famous argument between Huxley and Arnold 130 years ago was repeated50 years ago when C.P. Snow, a scientist as well as novelist, coined theconcept of the 'two cultures': one, scientific and technical, and theother, literary and traditional. Snow blamed both scientists and literarypeople for the 'gulf of mutual incomprehension' separating them, butsuggested that scientists were on the whole morally superior. They 'havethe future in their bones', he wrote, and were more concerned aboutimproving material life than literary people, who seemed content just tocontemplate human tragedy.

Snow's views inevitably instigated a response - including a famouslyviolent one from literary critic F.R. Leavis, who called Snow 'portentouslyignorant', and another more temperate reaction from another critic LionelTrilling, who suggested a disinterested mind might be able to bridge the'two cultures'.

What is remarkable is how little progress we have made in solving theproblem of integrated education. One can revisit the Huxley-Arnold debateof 130 years ago, or the Snow-Leavis dust-up 80 years later, and get thefeeling that one is reading about current controversies.
The choice, now as before, seems to be between the Huxley-Snow position - aprimarily scientific education, with some loose change from the humanitiesto provide imaginative variety - and the Arnold-Leavis position - aprimarily humanistic education, with some loose change from the sciencesbecause they are unavoidable. But whether the stress is on science or thehumanities, the assumption is that one can adopt a smorgasbord, or dim sum,approach to education: a little of this, a little of that - and hopefully,the combination will add up to a balanced diet. The end result is not somuch the integration of knowledge but a sampling of its variety. The corecurriculum programmes of both Chicago and Harvard universities, despitetheir undoubted intellectual rigour, suffer from this limitation.

Can anything be done? As it so happens, there is one person who intervenedin the Snow-Leavis debate - Aldous Huxley, the grandson of T.H. Huxley andthe grand-nephew of Matthew Arnold, interestingly - who did have a valuablesuggestion: Instead of trying to devise an integrated education fromtheoretical first principles, why not begin with questions which wouldrequire the coordination of different knowledges to answer?

'Who are we? What is the nature of human nature? How should we be relatedto the planet on which we live? How are we to live together satisfactorily?What is the relationship between nature and nurture? If we start with theseproblems..., we can bring together information from a great number of atpresent completely isolated disciplines.'
Such a pragmatic approach might be something we might adopt in our questfor a 'holistic' education - an approach that begins with the questions: Sowhy do you want to know different things? What for?