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The Problem With the “Disciplines”

June 24, 2016 By Will Richardson 1 Comment

zen deleteHere’s your Friday moment of EduZen to think about over the weekend. Your thoughts welcomed. Enjoy!

Russel Ackoff:

There is no longer the slightest justification for introducing children to the idea that human thought is a collection of fragmented “disciplines” and making that idea the center-pin of the educational experience for students in their schools. As a historical curio, this idea might make for an amusing aside in a general discussion of the evolution of human thought, but as a notion that is productive and useful for developing minds it is, at the very least, counterproductive. Children grow up seeing the world as a whole. Their greatest challenge—one that continues to be the central task of every person throughout life—is to form a worldview that makes sense out of the multitude of their experiences. Indeed, human sanity depends on the integrated nature of a person’s worldview; fragmented psyches are generally considered ill-adapted to the needs of adult survival” (Kindle 950).

Filed Under: EduZen, learning, schools

Comments

  1. Tom Hoffman says

    June 24, 2016 at 4:09 pm

    I think this point of view has become very destructive, because while an integrated, multi-disciplinary outlook is essential to being a fully educated person, a non-disciplinary approach is dangerous. You have to understand that Common Core ELA/Literacy is what you end up with if you abandon disciplines. There is ultimately no grounds for discussing whether they are good or bad because there essentially is no discipline of English Language Arts in America now.

    You don’t have to only think like a scientist or historian, but if you drop the idea of disciplines, you cannot even make the distinction between the two processes properly.

    At this point, it is a radical idea in American education to assert that there are four core subjects — English, math, science and history/social studies — which have roughly equal importance. Getting back to that basic model is actually one of the best actually achievable changes we could make.

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