A long time ago it might have been possible to know everything there was to know. For example, there were people like Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci, who managed to become experts in several fields. They were scientists, philosophers, artists and inventors whose unparalleled and seemingly boundless curiosity extended the realm of human understanding in many directions.
But you and I can never expect to achieve the same scope of intellectual and creative mastery as those exceptional Renaissance men. We are trapped by our own successes. The sheer volume of knowledge and ideas has grown at an exponential rate; there is more to know now than ever before.
So, in order to be productive and employable, we specialize, and then sub-specialize, and even sub-sub-specialize until we become proficient in a very narrowly defined field. While this allows for efficiency and division of labor in the workplace, it seems to undervalue broad curiosity and enthusiasm for learning.
In the university, specialization is woven into the geography of campus where engineering students stay on one side and art students another. The separation is not just physical. Intellectually we seldom venture outside our comfort zones unless forced to. Humanities students fulfill their physical sciences requirement only under duress while future computer scientists disdain having to sit through one ethnic studies class.
And if specialization is the key to success, why should we bother with breadth requirements? Shouldn’t the focus be on gaining as much knowledge and expertise in the fields in which we will one day work? But education is less about gaining specific tidbits of knowledge than learning how to use that information. The point of school is to learn how to think about, analyze and integrate facts and ideas into a larger worldview.
Chemists, philosophers, mathematicians and geneticists each ask their own questions. They tackle different problems using unique methods. By studying a little in each of those fields, we gain experience in different ways of thinking and learning. The broader our repertoire of problem solving methods and analytical skills, the less daunting new challenges become.
Although there is certainly personal fulfillment in this sort of Renaissance approach to learning, it has practical importance as well. As President Barack Obama keeps reminding us, many of the jobs and careers we will one day have don’t even exist yet. Our professional lives will involve a continual development of new skills and knowledge. The people who will fare best in this environment are those who can easily learn and adapt to different ways of thinking.
Even though the real world will demand ever more nimble thinkers, it won’t cultivate them. Only in university is there time to develop broad experiences in different disciplines. Higher education is an opportunity to learn how to learn in a supportive environment where mistakes mean a bad grade rather than professional failure.
The temptation is to stay on one side of campus, to focus only on information that pertains to this major or that. But the best education, the best preparation for the real world, comes from thinking like a geologist one day and a political scientist the next. Even if we can’t achieve the successes of Franklin or da Vinci, we can certainly try to learn and think like they did.
Geoff Jara-Almonte ([email protected]) is a fourth-year graduate medical student.
