Problems, problems…
For many, the age of the true polymath has gone. Far from an age when the pool of human knowledge was small and access to education was reserved for the privileged and the brilliant, the opportunities for the modern-day Avicenna, da Vinci or Leibniz to make pinnacular contributions to many fields during the course of a single lifetime are limited, if not impossible. Everywhere, there are barriers: the continuing vastness of human research, much of it specious or even damaging to the planet and its residents; the dumbing-down of swathes of education for the purpose of creating placeholders for those not able to find jobs; the shrieks of nepotism that can lead to the bypassing of worthy individuals because their skin, sex or philosophy does not fit; and the endless mantra of ‘specialise, specialise, specialise’.
And yet…while education and research may be moving further and further into silos and down ratholes, industry and business needs the polymath more than ever. We don’t continue to call these people ‘polymaths’, of course, nor are they required to be the geniuses that Newton and Lomonosov undoubtedly were. But the nature of many professions these days requires a broader spectrum of knowledge and skill than ever before, made ever broader by the joint tsunamis of data science, the green and net-zero agendas, and the knowledge and digital economies.
The word today is interdisciplinarity. Whether it’s building spreadsheet and database skills into a traditional administrative job, or new sustainability skills in an engineer’s design brief, or for a manager to understand where and how data science can provide proper business insight, more - and more diverse - competences are being asked of workers than ever before.
Of course, we’ve always had the craft equivalent, the jack-of-all-trades. But the latterly-invented sting in the tail - master of none - reflects the devaluation of the rounded individual and the prevailing view of many educationalists that developing interdisciplinarity takes too much time and does not build sufficient capacity in the individual to tackle real-world problems. The Grasshopper doesn’t buy that.
Interdisciplinarity is vital in today’s world. Teaching and career development along polymath lines is not only increasingly valuable, but essential. Modern-day interdisciplinarity is brought on by the growth in technology, loss of environment, explosion in social liberalism and many other factors.
The Grasshopper likes the worldview of the newly-built London Interdisciplinary School (LIS). In its own words, ‘[as] a society, it has never been more important to face our shared problems with new ways of thinking and understanding. This new era of ‘transformation’ is continuous. Living in a state of change is the new normal. We will teach our students the skills and tools they need to be comfortable with this change.’
Those skills and tools are both quantitative and qualitative, scientific and social, hard and soft. Check out LIS here.
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