Rethinking education

 

RETHINKING EDUCATION

Mario D’Couto

“A jack of all trades is a master of none but often times better than a master of one”

    There used to be a time when it was alright to study and get good grades and you would be assured of a decent career. Today, the situation is different. Especially in India (and also in some other parts of the world), where unemployment seems to be already creeping in where engineering graduates are unable to find the desired career they studied for and people being laid off because of A.I. taking over jobs, the question that comes up is whether is it worth investing all the money in the current education system. Now before you raise your reservations, my hope is that through this blogpost/reflection, I may be able to sow a seed of thought to rethink how we view education. The purpose of this blogpost/reflection is not to discard what has been handed down regarding education but to take it a step further, so as to enable the current generation of students and for the future, to provide a framework that will help them survive the obstacles that life may bring along.

 

         Teaching is not something that is restricted to only the school or an educational institution and so with that being said, it is and should never be restricted to science, maths, history, geography and so on and while you may be thinking that I am hinting at moral education which is certainly important, there is something that education far encompasses which I think, in my humble opinion is what is urgently needed today and that is polymathy. What is polymathy? If we search on Google, it is mentioned over there that polymathy refers to the state or the characteristic of being a polymath, which is someone with expertise in many different fields of study. It’s been said that the polymath is not just knowledgeable but excels in multiple areas, demonstrating intellectual versatility and a broad range of skills. Now while that may be the case for which most of us may feel intimidated at the thought of how can it be possible to excel at several different fields all at once, here’s something I want to point out and that is while you may become a jack of all trades and a master of none, you would nonetheless be better than a master of one because let’s face it, the knowledge of the ‘specialist’ is restricted to only one field whereas you, the aspiring polymath, stand at an advantage as compared to the ‘specialist’ where your knowledge covers other domains of thought and fields of study.

            The Greek poet Archilochus once wrote about  the fox and the hedgehog where it was used as a comparison of two approaches to understanding the world which can be seen in the following words, “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. This concept was popularized in the modern world by Isaiah Berlin in his 1953 essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox”. In Berlin’s essay, he uses the fox and the hedgehog to categorize thinkers and writers into two distinct groups where hedgehogs are those who see the world through a single, overarching idea or principle, relating everything to that core concept while on the other hand, foxes embrace a multitude of ideas and perceptions, seeing the world as complex and not reducible to a single, unifying idea and while Berlin applies this concept particularly to thinkers and writers, this can be applied to life in general especially when it comes to the realm of knowledge and education or just in the way one perceives and tries to make sense of the world. Now is one better than the other? To answer that, allow me to quote the words of the eminent physicist and mathematician, Freeman Dyson who once spoke about the analogy of frogs and birds as a way to reconcile specialisation with generality which can be seen in the following words, “We need both focused frogs and visionary birds. Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizons. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of a particular objects and they solve problems one at a time.” As a  mathematician, Dyson labelled himself a frog but contended, “It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they see farther or that frogs are better than birds because they see deeper. The world is broad and deep. We need birds and frogs working together to explore it.” We may just say that the reason as to why Dyson made such a statement was because he felt that science is increasingly overflowing with frogs, trained only in a narrow speciality and unable to change as science itself does which can be seen in the following words, “This is a hazardous situation for the young people and also for the future of science.” Fortunately, it is possible even today, even at the cutting edge, even in the most hyperspecialized specialities, to cultivate land where both birds and frogs can thrive and this does not apply only in the field of science but even to other aspects of life. The plight though is that for the most part, the way education was imparted in the past and still is today, seems to be like just filling up a vase rather than lighting the candle, that is to say, training the minds to think or to help students develop their creativity and become good problem solvers.

    It must be noted though that it never used to always be this way. The capricious nature of early human life, in which human knowledge was limited yet the challenges and opportunities so great, would have demanded exceptional versatility and creativity. Zoologist and ethnologist Desmond Morris in his book, “The Naked Ape” confirmed that the human person is by nature the most non – specialized, adaptive, opportunistic animal of all. Hence the further we go back in time, the more polymathy we will find given that domains were undefined and expertise in one field would not have inhibited interest in another. This is to say that an expert stargazer could also be a healer or a hunter or both and one can add other attributes depending on the situation.

            In such early societies, most humans would have made it their business to become ‘practical generalists’, which was to acquire a wide range of knowledge and skills which had a practical value for their survival. This often meant that one person would have the knowledge of a botanist or a physician (to know which plants harm, heal and which are edible), the skill of a hunter (to provide for themselves and their families), the creativity of an architect or engineer (building a safe house or shelter on the correct terrain using the right materials) and the mind of an artist (to entertain and enlighten his family or community through games, shows and visual artwork). There was no division of labour; everyone was everything they could be. No doubt everyone had his or her particular strengths and inclinations which were recognized, encouraged and drawn upon for the sake of the community, family or tribe which is to say that a functionalist society did inevitably develop but there is no evidence of a life – long culture of micro – specialization.

        So then how did everything change? The philosophical origins of modern specialization can be found in the post – Enlightment Western intellectual paradigm which perceived the vastness of knowledge to be unmanageable as a whole, something that was pioneered by the French philosopher Rene Descartes. But more than that, it was a disillusionment with polymathy, like as though it had lost its charm. The American writer Charles Van Doren explains this in his book, “History of knowledge”, in the following words, “The failure of the Renaissance to produce successful ‘Renaissance Men’ did not go unnoticed. If such men as Leonardo, Bacon and many others almost as famous could not succeed in their presumed dream of knowing all there was to know about everything, the lesser men should not presume to try. The alternative became self – evident: achieve expertise in one field while others attained expertise in theirs. Much easier to accomplish, this course led to a more comfortable academic community. Now an authority in one field need compete only with experts in his field.”

            It is this apparent futility of the situation that led many intellectuals to claim a niche area which they felt was the only way in which they could develop a sense of identity, purpose and in many cases, a vocation. This reality, together with the exponential rise in the number of disciplines and sub – disciplines, is what led to the over – emphasis of specialization in one particular area and once colonialism came into the picture, this thought process spread to other parts of the world, most notably India, Kenya, Malaysia, South Africa, Australia and the Americas. Fast – forward later and then we have the Industrial Revolution where a mass education system was introduced to meet the needs of industrial production. Unfortunately though, the alienating nature of this widespread education came at the expense of intellectual unity, synthesis and understanding.

      This is because the curriculum was designed to produce factory labourers who could read instruction manuals at most and specialise on one particular area of the production line. Subjects were therefore compartmentalized and taught in isolation from one another, with students themselves treated like products on a factory conveyor belt, receiving incremental input at different points along the process. Children were not encouraged to see the connections between those pockets of knowledge packaged as ‘curriculum subjects’. British philosopher of education, Alfred North Whitehead, who lived during the height of industrialised Britain, recognised that this approach to education was keeping children from understanding the relevance of each topic, both to their own lives but also to the world at large, as he wrote, “Instead of this single unity, we offer algebra, from which nothing follows; history, from which nothing follows; a couple of languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, literature, represented by the plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot or character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent life as it is known in the midst of living it? The best that can be said of it is, that is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world and has not yet determined how to put it together.” By the turn of the 20^th century, the world’s three most influential institution, namely, academia, government and the corporation, had each adopted a stringent division of labour, establishing a new culture of hyper – specialization in every sphere of life, a trend that would become the norm to the present day.

            If we look at the current education system, we will find that it is clearly not working, at least according to British  educationalist, Ken Robinson. This is because it is grossly outdated, which seems to have been stuck in the Victorian British era which fostered a culture of ‘linearity, conformity and standardization’. Today, however, times have changed. We are faced with a different world, one that is organic, adaptable and diverse. This incongruence affects the students’ intellectual and professional prospects. So treating children like robots doesn’t suit the 21^st century job market. Anders Sandberg of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute would explain this phenomenon in the following way, “Educational institutions don’t need to train people to be cogs in a machine like during the industrial age – machines will be much cheaper …….. they ought to train people to deal with more complex, ill – defined jobs.” The plight of this whole situation is that parents and teachers are convinced that the path of ultra – focus and specialization is the way to go. Consequently this not only hampers the multi – faceted creativity present within each child but also it ill – equips them to make vocational choices, getting swept up by a system that treats humans as mere cogs in the corporate machine.

           This is why having a diverse interest is important because it helps one to develop new perspectives and see things in different ways that others may have missed. Charles Darwin was one such person. He always juggled multiple projects and had at least 231 scientific pen pals who can be grouped roughly into 13 broad themes based on his interests, from worms to human sexual selection. He peppered them with questions. He cut up their letters to paste pieces of information in his own notebooks, in which ‘ideas tumble over each other in a seemingly chaotic fashion’. When his chaotic notebooks become too unwieldy, he tore pages out and filed them by themes of inquiry. Just for his own experiments with seeds, he corresponded with geologists, botanists, ornithologists and conchologists in France, South Africa, the United States, Jamaica and Norway, not to mention a number of amateur naturalists and some gardeners he happened to know. Howard Gruber, a psychologist who studied Darwin’s journals made the following observation, “Charles Darwin’s greatest works represent interpretative compilations of facts first gathered by others.” According to Gruber, the activities of a creator may appear, from the outside, as a bewildering miscellany but yet the creator under all that can still ‘map’ each activity onto one of the ongoing enterprises. In other words, this is to say that while on the outside, the activities of a polymath may seem chaotic, jumping from one subject to another, the polymath knows exactly what he is doing and why he is doing it and is therefore certainly not haphazard. Darwin was indeed a lateral – thinking integrator. He was, one of the most curious and actively open – minded human beings in history. He made it a point of copying into his notes any fact or observation he encountered that ran contrary to a theory he was working on. He relentlessly attacked his own ideas, dispensing with one model after another, until he arrived at a theory that fit the totality of the evidence. This is something that we need to inculcate if we want to develop a comprehensive and broader perspective not in just the things we do but about life in general, enabling us to see things with a new perspective and thus enhancing our creativity. To put this into practice, we would need to learn to drop our familiar tools, all the pre-conceived notions that could hold us back as the psychologist and organizational behaviour expert Karl Weick once said, “Dropping one’s tools is a proxy for unlearning, for adaptation, for flexibility. It is the very unwillingness of people to drop their tools that turns some of those dramas into tragedies.” This coupled with the ability to ask questions about multiple phenomenon (both related and seemingly unrelated) is the hallmark of a curious mind. We may just say that the child is the ultimate enquirer, the pre – polymath and although adults do not lose the curiosity that seems to be a primordial human trait, their curiosity deteriorates in quality and type over time. They become more preoccupied with the ‘how’ than the ‘why’; more concerned with the information rather than the understanding of it.

       Critical thinkers such as polymathic philosophers continue this child’s legacy in a more

sophisticated and systemised manner while most other adults are preoccupied with the specific practicalities of everyday life. They think they know what they need to know and as such become increasingly close – minded and thus lose their sense of wonder. Thus having said that, why is it that this is the case, that adults are not able to take along with them, this child – like curiosity? Well, for starters, it has been observed that the brain has a natural dislike for ambiguity and thus often seeks to blindly eliminate than to explore. Ambiguity, can for some, spark a curiosity but others who prefer immediate certainty block the investigative process altogether. Most people urgently demand an answer in order to end further information processing and judgment, even if that answer is not correct or the best answer. 

    Another possible reason that can put the polymath in a bad light is because given that the polymath is open-minded, it can come across that he is being indecisive. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. For the truly curious mind, open-mindedness is simply a disposition, a systematic method of enquiry, an intellectual approach to life rather than a state of inevitable confusion and inconclusiveness. In fact, open – mindedness can often provide more clarity if one is willing to patiently pursue the truth. However, this would be possible when we are able to ask the question, “Why …”, “Why does this matter to me?” “Why does it have to be that way?” “Why can it not be the other way?” and so on as the polymath and founder of Mathematica, Stephen Wolfram once said, “You need a reason to learn about something” and often the reason is simply about life itself. Having more skills and knowledge puts us in a better space to deal with life’s situations. Complacency and ignorance, on the other hand, reduce our quality of life and withhold our ability to stay in control. We must learn, for instance at least the basic skills of the lawyer, the accountant, the doctor, the handyman, the computer engineer, the entertainer, the soldier and so on because legal, financial, medical, household, technical and survival challenges are typical in modern life. Otherwise, we become complacent and rely on the luxury of having ‘experts’, living unnecessarily at their mercy for even the most basic problems. This can prove costly, both in the financial sense and otherwise. That is why the British intellectual Raymond Tallis would say, “Why restrict your curiosity, for God’s sake? Don’t just look that way; explore what’s behind you and sideways. Learn the best of what’s been taught and said in every area” which is something we cannot ignore if ever we want to be more productive and make our lives meaningful . This is something what Martin Kemp, a leading expert on Leonardo Da Vinci, had to say regarding the power of curiosity, a hallmark of the polymath, something which he observed in the life of Leonardo Da Vinci which can be seen in the following words, “The mind of Leonardo is a mind that is entirely curious like a child – why does that happen, what am I looking at, how can I understand it and if you combine that sort of child – like curiosity with enormous intellectual power, you get something very potent”.

    The good thing is that we live in a time and age where the barrier to knowledge is low as the polymath and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, Nathan Myhrvold, once said, “This is the best century ever for polymaths. There has never been better access to the full spectrum of human knowledge or to the other people interested in whatever niche topics you find fascinating. Thanks to the enormous library of information online, the barrier to learning about a new area has never been lower”. The only thing required is a strong sense of curiosity and a relentless spirit of endurance in the pursuit of truth.

    I sometimes wonder what people like Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo and others would have done if they had access to the kind of technology and information that we have today. Mind you, despite the little they had back then, that did not stop them from exploring and finding solutions to problems, some of which whose principles, are still being used today, which brings me to the point of the autodidact. You may or may have not come across this word but autodidacts are basically those people who prefer to teach themselves or to pick up knowledge from non – teaching situations in one way or another. They are the ones who are able to recognize the limits of standard educational systems and autonomously pursue what they consider to be of interest and value to them. Many of the most erudite people today do not come from traditionally ‘intellectual’ circles. In fact, most do not even have basic education, let alone college degrees. It is not surprising then that most polymaths over history have been autodidacts such as Michael Faraday, Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Frankin, Thomas Edison and others who were self – taught in almost everything they did.

            To conclude, the need for polymathy has never been more strong because given the rate at which the conditions of human living and the circumstances surrounding it are changing, to use solutions from the past or things that have always been done in a specific way as a means to resolve a current problem or issue may not always be helpful as author Tim Ferriss once said, “We are suffering from age – old problems that are yet to be solved as well as brand new ones that the world has never seen. I think that polymaths are uniquely suited to potentially serve critical roles as problem – solvers; to provide those creative breakthrough that are very uncommon and yet are much needed to mould a better future for people.” The author, neuroscientist and music producer, Daniel Levitin, who is known for his books such as “The Organized Mind” and “This is your brain on your music”, said something similar which can be seen in the following words, “Polymaths are of increasing value in the twenty – first century because the big problems of the world such as the unequal distribution of wealth around the world, racism and bigotry, terrible inter and intra country aggressions, climate change are not going to be solved by someone coming from a single – disciplinary perspective. If their solutions were simple we would have solved them already. I don’t see them being solved by someone who is just a political scientist, just a diplomat or just an economist …. They are going to need someone that has at least a sufficient level of broad expertise so that they can help bridge the gap as part of a team of specialists.” Even from a career standpoint, if we go to see, the commonly held notion that specialization leads to greater financial security is actually a myth, something that Ferriss affirms. He uses comedian and management guru Scott Adam’s theory to explain that the number of people who can derive extraordinary financial reward, security or opportunity from being in the top one percent in their field is by definition very small. There is only job security in it if you are the very best, which of course is extremely difficult. Alternatively, if one can get into the top ten percent in two or more seemingly unrelated fields or skills and then synthesize them intelligently and thoughtfully, one would then have a higher likelihood of success.

 

        David Epstein makes a similar observation in his book, “Range – How generalists triumph in a specialized world”, where he talks about how Linkedin’s resume database and its own research has found that one of the strongest predicters of who will eventually become an executive is the number of different job functions an individual has worked across. Based on that analysis, Linkedin’s principal economist Guy Berger, gave some straightforward advice, “My recommendation for those of you who want to become executives is to work across as many job functions as possible.” Executives with more varied careers have also found to be more likely to have novel strategies, which is key to a sustainable competitive advantage, a point that has been affirmed by Gina Dokko, a professor at the University of California – Davis Graduate School of Management. Research has established pretty firmly that diverse groups of people are better at innovation and problem solving but more recent research in finding that diverse career histories within a single person can also benefit performance.

            With that being said, if there is one key take – away that I hope you can draw out is, our minds are capable of great potential but too often we underestimate it. To the outsider, the polymath is seen as an oddity. In reality though, he is simply being human because to be truly human is to make the best use of all the gifts God has bestowed on each of us. God did not put us on earth to just occupy space. If that were the case, we would be no better than a piece of stone because stones are inanimate, lifeless objects that just occupy space but don’t provide or contribute any value and while such a person may or may not become an expert in all the fields of knowledge and expertise that he pursues, the fact of the matter is that in putting the effort, it broadens his understanding of reality which in turn helps develop his own individuality. If we can each exercise such individuality in our own way, the dynamics of power in the future can become very different. We can create a new culture that puts the full realisation of human potential at it. Sure , it would be nice to focus or go along the path of knowledge linearly as it seems like a tidy prescription, low on uncertainty and high on efficiency but the truth is life is far more complex than we can imagine and so while experimentation can seem untidy, it has its advantages and it requires more than the typical motivational -poster lip service to a tolerance for failure because let’s face it, we discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks and finding new role models. We learn who we are in practice, not in theory as the American artist, Howard Finster once said, “A person doesn’t know what he can do unless he tries. Trying things is the answer to finding your talent.” So if you are feeling behind everyone else, the only person that you need to compare yourself to is the person you were yesterday, not to others who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate. So don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you are going, so feeling behind doesn’t help. The only real defeat is when you choose to remain down after the fall and not rise up. 

        This blogpost/reflection was written keeping in mind the current education system and while the purpose of it was to create an awareness about its effects, being a polymath is not age – restricted. Surely learning young is learned for life but that does not and should not stop us, even as adults from developing the power of curiosity and using it as a tool in becoming the best version of ourselves. Well, that is something that I will leave for another blogpost/reflection. Until then, stay blessed!