So there I was in the middle of a lecture, time ticking by as slowly as ever when I heard it. Not the ruffling of paper, or the clicking of pens, but the “ping” of that imaginary light bulb of realization that hovers over your head when you get an idea. What I thought was a lesson about early American education methods quickly turned in to an actual, real life interdisciplinarity moment! Thank goodness this episode came out when it did, because the writer (me) had been suffering from a major writer’s block.
After a solid hour of talking about educational preferences of Merriam Webster and Thomas Jefferson, my professor said something along the lines of ‘Webster did not want a multicultural society and wanted an extremely patriotic state while Jefferson preferred a society with diversity in order to look at history and to learn from the past of those around us, etc etc etc…’ And that was when, as clear as day, I heard it. The “ping.”
Sitting numbly in my chair I thought, what if society and the educational system followed Webster’s example? And I could only think about how far behind we’d be as a country if we were without a multicultural society, and how much knowledge we would lack. In chapter 5 of Moran’s “Interdisciplinarity,” the following quote stands out in particular to me: “The long-standing division between the humanities and the sciences remains a resilient obstacle to interdisciplinary study, but it is still capable of being challenged. ” (Moran 134) I immediately compared it to Webster and Jefferson’s conflicting views.
Dubbing Webster as “sciences” and Jefferson as “humanities” I was able to relate two pioneers of early American education to a pretty significant issue discussed throughout Moran’s book: the clashing of humanities and sciences. (Siding with Jefferson) it would not be possible to have such a vast bank of knowledge in today’s world had we dismissed the idea of a multicultural society like the one we have today. The debate regarding the clashing of humanities and sciences parallels the ongoing debate about a multicultural society versus a singular, patriotic American society.
There is nothing wrong with being proud of the country in which we live. In fact, American patriotism is a very important factor in our culture. With that in mind, it does no good to oust those of us who are not as ‘pro-America’ as others. Just as it is unproductive to study science and only science without also being learned in English, or History, or Languages, we get nowhere by only studying or accepting American culture. The many cultures in the melting pot that is the United States has provided us with a rich, diverse culture from which we have learned so much. If we can take so much knowledge out of the cultures of others, why do we not extend the combination to the sciences and humanities, in an effort to combine pools of knowledge to discover a new and beautiful mixture?
Moran, Joe. Interdisciplinarity. New York and London: Routledge, 2010. Print