I’ve been
listening to Lost
Enlightenment, which suggests something interesting that I had remembered
before and assimilated into my own life, but now I think it needs to be
incorporated into higher education.
The ancient
and Renaissance thinkers did not specialize. They didn’t exclude disciplines of
thought in favor of one area, or even a sub-area of an existing area. Da Vinci,
Newton, Aristotle, Socrates, and others wrote and thought about everything from
mathematics to art to philosophy, treating the interactions of what we think of
as disparate areas of thought as simply pieces of a larger whole.
It’s
understandable that specialization, or even hyper-specialization in fields of
knowledge would become necessary in order to advance even further, but we’ve
gotten away from crucial truths that areas of academic interest are all related
when it comes to their general spheres of information.
Why, then,
do we treat these areas as specialized at these general levels? I believe that
extending the boundaries of subjects and realizing how they incorporate and
touch upon these other spheres leads to a greater understanding forces the mind
to grow in ways reminiscent of what these great thinkers experienced.